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GAN-EDEN: 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 



" Tho place was called Gan-Eden, the Garden of Delight ; and it be- 
longed to the Caliph Haroun-Al-Raschid, who, when his heart was con- 
tracted, used to come to that garden and sit there ; so his heart became 
dilated, and his anxiety ceased." — Noureddin and the Fair Persian. 




BOSTON: 

PUBLISHED BY JOHN P. JEWETT AND COMPANY. 

CLEVELAND, OHIO: 

JEWETT, PROCTOR AND WORTHINGTON. 

NEW YORK : SHELDON, LAMPORT AND BLAKEMAN. 

1854. 









Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1854, by 
JOHN P. JEWETT AND COMPANY, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 



^-%2S AUm 



CAMBRIDGE : 

ALLEN AND FARNHAM, STEREOTTPERS AND PRINTERS 



TO MY FRIEND 

MRS. F. W. S., 



EN THE NAME OF ONE WHOSE MEMORY IS LINKED WITH THE 

SWEETEST AND THE SADDEST RECOLLECTIONS 

OF MY CUBAN JOURNEY, 

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED. 



PREFACE. 



In calling Cuba a " Garden of Delight," I 
only express the sum of those bright memories, 
of a genial nature, and of more genial human 
friends, which I brought away from the tropics. 

The title "Pictures of Cuba," indicates my 
intention in composing this volume. I have not 
attempted to write a history, or a gazetteer of 
Cuba. I have only sought to reproduce the 
sights and thoughts which passed before the eyes, 
and through the mind of one whose interest in 
Cuba is by no means recent, and who tried to 
see and to think for himself. Many mistakes 
of detail, I must have made. I have done my 
best to avoid them, but my chief wish has been, 
to preserve the aroma of those general impres- 
sions, which are the best things that an unscien- 



Vlll PEEFACE. 

tific traveller has to offer to an exacting public. 
The considerate reader, to whom I shall be for- 
tunate enough to convey any distincter notions 
of the sweet, sad South, I am sure, will pardon 
the prominence which the plan of the book 
necessarily gives to the first personal pronoun. 

It is proper to say here, that something of the 
substance of these pages has already appeared 
in the form of letters addressed to the National 
Era, and that Chapter XIV. has been altered and 
condensed from an article published in the North 
American Review, for January, 1849. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

CHAPTER I . . . l 

II • 15 

III 23 

"IV 34 

V 45 

"VI. 58 

" VII 73 

" VIII 86 

"IX 100 

X. 124 

"XI 139 

" XII 153 

" XIII ]81 

" XIV. , 202 

"XV 225 



GAN-EDEN 



PICTURES OF CUBA 



CHAPTER I. 

"New-born delights." 

Keats. 

There are names which affect us like a 
delicious poem or a glowing picture. When 
young Hassan heard his father talking with 
the merchants from Cairo about Egypt and 
her Nile, his heart dilated with pleasurable 
pain, and he found no rest till he sallied 
forth from the western gate of Mosul across 
the Syrian sands. Only with reading over 
the names on a map of Italy or of England, 
we can warm a winter's hour, and cover 
the barest walls with such landscapes as 
never Claude or Constable, Tintoret or 
Turner put upon the canvas. The name 
of Cuba leaves a ring of doubloons on the 
ear, a flavor of guava on the lips. 

Cuba has no history. One sublime figure 
alone does that magic word summon up 
1 



A GAN-EDEN. 

before us, a figure how sublime ! a shape of 
rewarded greatness, — of triumphant pa- 
tience, — a grand heroic figure, motionless 
upon the rude prow of a low caravel, with 
sad eyes brightening in an awful joy, as that 
new world, borne about so long within his 
throbbing brain, slowly rises, a visible 
reality, from the bosom of the calm blue 
sea! 

Before Columbus all human history in 
Cuba is a blank, after him it is all blood 
and business. Yet is that fair island a land 
of sirens to those who know it not ; to those 
who have wandered there, a land of the 
lotus. I have heard young men talk re- 
gretfully of the Havana while lounging 
along the brilliant Boulevards of Paris, and 
a venerable merchant, as chary of his 
emotions as of his indorsements, once said 
to me, with a light of youth in his old gray 
eyes, that his arrival in Cuba gave him the 
most vivid idea he ever had of the passage 
from this world to the next. What won- 
der that this should be so ? The Northern 
Anglo-American sails from his "stern and 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 3 

rock bound coast," racked in body upon the 
swiftly revolving wheels of a climatic tor- 
ture, the pains of which are the more in- 
tense, that he cannot anticipate where or 
when they will recur, — racked in spirit by 
the vexatious excitements of the most dis- 
tracting and unjoyous life men have ever 
led. He finds in tropical Spanish America 
a Kingdom of Cockaigne 

" a place 

Blest by Heaven's especial grace, 

A pleasant shore, 

Where a sweet clime is breathed from a land 
Of fragrance, quietness, and trees and flowers, 
Pull of calm joy it is, as we of grief, 
Too full of joy and soft delicious warmth." 

Within three days' sail of our southern 
ports, lie scenes than which India itself 
offers nothing more thoroughly strange to 
our eyes. The world of nature is strange. 
The eye seeks in vain the many-branching 
small-leaved forests of the Continent. They 
are replaced by taller, more leafy, more 
graceful tribes of the vegetable kingdom, — 
the grains and the grasses of our cornfields 
and our ponds, shooting up, mighty arbo- 



4t GAN-EDEN. 

rescent giants overhead. The rich and 
dainty flowers, whose acquaintance we 
made as the delicately nurtured belles of 
the aristocratic New England hothouse, 
flaunt upon us, rude and healthy hoydens, 
from every hedge and roadside. New 
lights are in the firmament, strange con- 
stellations shining with a planetary splen- 
dor in these new, more magnificent heavens. 
There, most beautiful of all the signs God 
hath set in the skies, flames the Southern 
Cross, the Christian constellation, the sym- 
bol of the new hopes and the new life re- 
vealed to Christendom in that later age 
when first it greeted European eyes. 
Strangely, among the new tenants of the 
upper world, shows the familiar brightness 
of Orion and of the Pleiades, and the great 
Northern Bear seems a wanderer like our- 
selves, gazing on the splendid southern stars 
as the rude Gothic heroes and fierce Vik- 
inger gazed of old upon the gorgeous 
pageantries of Eome and of Byzantium. 
The very crescent moon has changed, the 
huntress Diana has bartered her bow for a 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 5 

golden boat, in which she floats Cleopatra- 
like, and careless of the chase, through the 
luxurious purple skies. Not less strange in 
appearance than the moon, are the waters 
which she sways. The ocean rolls around 
the volcanic and coralline rocks, a tide more 
a deeply darkly beautifully blue " than is 
ever seen upon our northern coasts, more 
blue even than the glorious blue waters of 
the Mediterranean. These waters which 
are very deep close in shore, for the shores 
of northern Cuba are generally steep and 
sudden, are transparent and pellucid as the 
crystal of Lake George, and leaning over 
the bows of the ship you may see far down 
below you a whole submarine landscape of 
queer and enormous plants, populous with 
all manner of lazy conservatives, — huge 
turtles not less grave and aldermanic in 
appearance than their transatlantic human 
foes, — star-fishes content throughout their 
lives to be the admiration of their own 
Little Pedlingtons ; lazzaroni conchs to 
whom Heaven has granted what alone the 
lazzarone of Naples considers wanting to his 
1* 



b GAN-EDEN. 

bliss, " that food should have legs and crawl 
to him ; " for lying on his back, the happy 
conch, with feelers indolently stretched 
along the tide, takes toll of all slight living 
things that pass that way. How cool and 
inviting seem to the sun-burned, soul-weary 
voyager those silent watery realms, unvex- 
ed by merman or by mermaid, " a dream 
of idleness in groves Elysian ! " 

Not alone are the eyes refreshed with 
new sights on land and sea ; the air is full 
of winged jewels, the groves and canefields 
glancing by clay with the prismatic colors 
of thousands of coleoptera, and brilliant 
broad-winged butterflies, and glittering by 
night with the electrical splendors of the 
famous cucullos, those torch-bearing aerial 
watchmen, those living emeralds, whose 
effulgence no gem of the mineral world 
can rival. Nay, the very air itself is a 
novelty to northern lungs in which the 
senses take not less delight than in aught 
of sight or sound that rejoices them. 
Breathing, which is perhaps the greatest 
inconvenience of life in our intemperate 



PICTUBES OF CUBA. 



zone, becomes its chief and cheapest luxury 
in Cuba. One finds it more easy to surren- 
der his barbarian faith in the forms of mat- 
ter, and accepts more submissively the gos- 
pel of gas, when he finds how effectively 
and sweetly the mere atmosphere of the 
tropics can attune the dissonant chords of 
his substantial mortal body. Those bland 
airs steal over the system, curdled by our 
uneasy atmosphere, with a soothing influ- 
ence such as the companionship of the 
serene and the noble exerts upon hearts 
snatched from the society of the vexatious, 
the passionate, and the querulous. It is so 
strange and so pleasant to trust in the skies 
as one trusts in one's friends! Our north- 
ern Aurora is a mere Armida, — nay, she 
is a very Jael, and when, lulled by her 
seducing smiles, we lay our trusting heads 
upon her lap, she rewards our confidence 
with a nail smartly driven through the 
temples ! The Cuban morning, faithful as 
Fiordelisa, crowns us 

" Con gioia e con diletto 
Senza aver tenia o di gnerfa sospetto." 



8 GAN-EDEN. 

Here it is almost as unsafe to count upon 
a pleasant to-morrow in the country as to 
speculate upon the chances of a Cape Horn 
voyage, or a presidential nomination. In 
Cuba, a man may arrange periodical pic- 
nics for his grandchildren yet unborn. Of 
course in such a land nobody talks of the 
weather, excepting raw foreigners, and 
the comparative dullness of large social 
gatherings in Havana may perhaps be 
due in part to the impossibility of intro- 
ducing this agreeable and fruitful topic, to 
which we owe so much of the easy and 
brilliant conversation that abounds in our 
own saloons. 

If God's world in Cuba, the world of 
nature, as Columbus and Ojeda found it 
there three centuries ago, is thus strange to 
the children of the temperate zones, man's 
world, the world of arts and manners, as 
the successors of Columbus and Ojeda have 
reared it, is not less striking and strange. 
The northern voyager, as his steamer glides 
into the huge tub-shaped harbor of Havana, 
gazes with astonishment on a scene which 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 9 

revives his visions or his memories of the 
far Levant. Our Anglo-Saxondom has so 
appropriated to itself the American name ; 
the " young giant of the West/' so yearns to 
crown his head with the Arctic Circle and 
to bathe his feet in the southern sea, that 
most of us think little of those bygone 
days, when the Indies were but the pantry 
and the strong-box of the Catholic kings, 
when the Caribbean was a Spanish lake, 
when the man who sailed from London a 
trader was hung in Panama a pirate, and 
the old Gothic monarchy talked as confi- 
dently of its manifest rights as does young 
America now of its manifest destiny. So 
it seems to us, that to have reached this 
stately panorama of Havana, we must have 
traversed many miles of longitude instead 
of a few degrees of latitude. On the left 
hand rise fortifications massive as those of 
Malta or Gibraltar, wrought into the dark 
grey rocks of the Morro, sweeping along 
the many-hued hill-sides of the Cabanas, 4 
glittering throughout their lengthening 
lines with the white uniforms and shin- 



10 GAN-EDEN. 

ing bayonets of the sentinels who guard 
the proud flag of Spain, that gorgeous 
banner of blood and of gold ? which sym- 
bolizes so well the career and the charac- 
ter of the pedlar knights, or knightly ped- 
lars, who conquered the Indies for Castile 
and Leon. 

On the right, stretch irregular masses 
of parti-colored buildings, blue, pink, white, 
green, yellow, overtopped at intervals by 
some massive church tower or graceful 
tufted palm-tree. Queer-looking boats, 
emancipated gondolas, shameless sisters of 
the veiled Venetian nuns, and brilliant as 
butterflies, dart in and out along the 
crowded quays. Half-naked negroes are 
riding fractious horses into the sluggish 
water, and a confused incessant buzz, like 
that which rises from vociferous Naples to 
the ear of the lonely traveller dreaming 
among the orange groves of lofty San 
Elmo, comes -faintly from the shore. You 
land, penetrate the mysteries of the city, 
and still the wonder grows. You call a 
coach, and find only an odd looking gig 



PICTURES OP CUBA. 11 

with shafts sixteen feet long, and wheels 
six yards in circumference, driven by a 
negro postilion, three parts jack-boots and 
one part silver-laced jacket. Into this 
singular vehicle you fling yourself, and find 
that to the gig of your dear native land, 
this tropical gig is as the pine-apple is to 
the pearmain, so luxurious, so cradling, 
to provocative of bland indifference to all 
worldly cares ! You reach your inn, and 
find it in appearance a Moorish palace, — 
in general discomfort a German boarding- 
house, in expense a Bond street hotel. 
You find that you are to live on two meals 
a day ; a breakfast that begins with eggs 
and rice, is sustained by fried pork and 
Catalan wine, and ends with coffee and 
cigars ; a dinner, every dish of which is a 
voyage of discovery. You are to sleep on 
what most resembles a square drum-head 
of Jullien dimensions, without mattress or 
coverlets, in a room with a red-tiled floor, 
and with windows in which the utter want 
of glass is compensated for by the presence 
of innumerable iron bars. Boots is a na- 



12 GAN-EDEN. 

tive African, an ex-cannibal for aught yon 
know, wonderfully tattooed, and the laun- 
dress an athletic young negress who 
smokes authentic long nines. 

You walk out through streets narrow as 
those of Pompeii, past shops open to the 
ground like those of Naples, and shaded 
with heavy awnings that often sweep 
across the street. Every thing is patent 
to your gaze and nobody seems to be aware 
of the fact. Only now and then you pass 
some vast pile of yellow stone, stately as 
the palaces of Genoa, and catch through 
the great archway a glimpse of court-yards, 
fountain-cooled and palm-shaded, that sug- 
gest dreams of Eastern seclusion and invisi- 
ble beauty. You dream on this fine dream, 
for in all your walk you meet no female 
form save of the Pariah class, unless, per- 
chance, you stumble on some fair for- 
eigner, at sight of whose bonnet the incu- 
rious native deigns to look up from his 
business in doors, or his lounge in the 
shade, with a sudden stare and a half-pity- 
ing smile, which provoke you to wonder 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 13 

that you had ever ceased to feel how fear- 
ful a thing the bonnet of civilization is. 
Water carriers, balancing their jars, mules 
half hidden from the eye by fresh bundles 
of green fodder, borne on either side, large 
cream-colored oxen, superb as the mild- 
eyed monsters of Lombardy, pulling pri- 
meval carts by means of yokes fastened in 
front of the horns, crowd up the narrow 
streets. And through them all the fre- 
quent calesero, swinging in his heavy sad- 
dle, steers the clumsy length of his quitrin 
with careless certain skill. 

The signs of the shops startle you, for 
if you are to take them an pied de la lettre, 
all the retail business of Havana is in the 
hands of saints, goddesses, and heroes, of 
birds, beasts, and beauties. St. Dominic 
deals in healing drugs, St. Anthony boldly 
handles laces, muslins, and ribbons, Diana 
dispenses sweets to all the dandies of the 
town, the Empress Eugenia meekly mea- 
sures tapes, and the blessed Sun himself 
has really "proved a micher," and cheats 
in cosmetics. The greater merchants, like 
2 



14 GAN-EDEN. 

the burghers of the middle ages, often 
occupy with their families the elegant 
upper floors of the building which in its 
first stories serves them for a warehouse. 

Not less mediaeval is the confusion of 
quarters. Next door to the begrimed 
hovel of a dealer in coal, rises the palatial 
home of the opulent marquis ; St. Giles and 
St. James elbow each other. 

Have we not passed the pillars of Her- 
cules, and shall we not "look the blue 
straits over," for the heights of Morocco ? 



CHAPTER II. 

" In the afternoon they came nnto a land 
Wherein it seemed always afternoon." 

•^ Tennyson. 

What shocks may not our personal iden- 
tity survive ? A month ago I sate, a listless 
convalescent, gowned and slippered, beside 
a roaring coal fire, feebly dreaming of Cuba 
and the Azores, of Madeira and of Georgia. 
Then, the cautious journey from the phials 
and pill-boxes of the sick room to the busts 
and the books of the genial library, was 
an affair of doubts, and hopes, and fears. 
Then, to watch the panting pedestrians in 
the street as they toiled through the drift- 
ing snow, and to follow the tintinnabular 
sleigh horse with the ear long after he had 
vanished from the eye in the eddying 
snow-mists, was to see the world and to 
share in its concerns. A fortnight later I 
lay sickening and shivering in the narrow 



16 GAN-EDEN. 

berth of an unquiet steamer, tossed to and 
fro by the riotous waves about Cape Hat- 
teras. And now I sit at mine ease, in the 
gigantic frescoed saloon of an old Spanish 
house, in a cool undress, oblivious of physic 
and of pain, lapped in a sweet frenzy of 
fragrance and of sunlight, eating, drinking, 
breathing the very life of summer ! — We 
left Charleston on a bleak wintry morning, 
and for two days I lay in my berth just 
over the boiler, and just under the heels 
of sixteen horses, en route for Havana, eat- 
ing oranges and wishing myself in New 
England. On the third day, the heat from 
below, and the noise from above, fairly 
drove me on deck. The weather had al- 
ready become demi-tropical, and a warm 
shimmer over the sea wooed us seduc- 
ingly onwards. When I awoke under the 
rich golden light that streamed through the 
cabin window on the fourth morning, we 
were just backing up to the pier at Key 
West. 

This purgatory of underwriters was a 
charming surprise to me. A low sandy 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 17 

shore, covered with a luxuriant growth of 
aloes and feathery palmettoes, and dot- 
ted all along with shining white cottages, 
among which towered a cage-like light- 
house ; rows of pelicans, dipping into the 
surf after fishes ; half a dozen vessels moor- 
ed along-side a long wooden pier, and as 
many more lying motionless further out on 
the glassy green water; such was Key 
West on that fine sunny morning. New 
life began to kindle in my veins. Delight- 
fully the day wore on. Flying-fishes dart- 
ed here and there above the surface of the 
still and glittering sea. Sometimes the 
white sails of a wrecking schooner, flap- 
ping in the calm ; sometimes the bare spars 
of a stranded ship ; sometimes the slender 
network of an iron light-house, drew the 
attention of the little knots of passengers 
from the general consultation of watches 
and the study of maps. We were seven 
hours behind time, and great was our fear 
lest we should not pass the Morro Castle 
before sundown. Since the times of Lopez, 
the government of the Island have enforc- 
2* 



18 GAN-EDEN. 

ed the order which forbids ships entering 
the harbor after the evening gun is fired, 
and it was not pleasant to anticipate a 
night on the rolling billows that ceaselessly 
surge outside the narrow gateway of the 
port. 

About noon the breeze sprang up, the 
good ship spread her wings, and with the 
double help of Daedalus and Watt we hur- 
ried onwards. Islet after islet appeared 
and vanished like shadows on the far hori- 
zon, low isles 

" remote, that ride 
On the ocean's bosom unespied." 

At four o'clock there was a rush to the 
upper deck, and lo ! bold and brown 
against the silver-blue cloud-bank before us, 
rose the irregular outline of Cuba. The 
hue of the waves brightened as we went 
onward, till we sailed through such glowing 
deeps of blue as beat about the cliffs of 
Capri. 

Plainer and plainer grew the brown hill- 
sides, the glancing Italian villas, the lofty 
palm-trees, — plainer and plainer the dark 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 19 

gray rocks and white tower of the Morro 
Castle, the terraced roofs and glittering 
houses of the city. Not a sail was in sight. 
It seemed as if we, fortunate discoverers, 
now saw before us that populous Cathay 
for which Columbus longed. Soon a lateen- 
sail swooped out on the sea from behind 
the threatening rocks, and the massive 
masonry of the fortin cations became dis- 
tinguishable. The lateen-sail drooped be- 
side our still advancing ship, a pilot came 
on board, and while the sun was still kind- 
ling the cloud-bank on our right, and flash- 
ing yellow light over all the gay and gor- 
geous scene, we shot through the narrow en- 
trance of the port, and the whole panorama 
of the vast landlocked bay, with its ships 
and its shores, suddenly swept into view, 
Not more strange, not more rich, not more 
beautiful is the bay of Naples or the road- 
stead of Genoa ! 

An endless line of masts from which 
floated a profusion of gay flags. Negroes 
in bright jackets and briefest trowsers 
thronging the quays of yellowish stone, or 



20 GAN-EDEN. 

darting over the water in boats, the lateen- 
sails and painted hulls of which, now bright 
scarlet, now blue, now striped in green and 
white, give infinite and picturesque variety 
to the scene. Great square stone ware- 
houses fronted with low colonnades; elegant 
dwellings in the Italian style, stuccoed and 
painted, and continually relieved by bright 
green jalousies and plumes of graceful foli- 
age ; the renowned volantes, brilliant with 
silver, rolling in and rolling out of enor- 
mous gateways. Ever and anon from be- 
hind the fanciful lines of the diversified 
houses, rises the sombre gray tower of a 
Komanesque church, or the high-peaked 
roof of a huge convent. 

The entrance to the harbor was hidden 
by the battlemented heights behind us, and 
what with solid forts, squaring the hill-tops 
here and there, and white hamlets, and red 
hamlets, and hamlets of every hue, and 
rich green tufts of tropical trees chequering 
the brown slopes, the whole circle of the 
harbor was as brightly beautiful as need 
be. Half a dozen Spanish men of war lay 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 21 

here and there about the bay; a French 
steam-frigate off the Alameda de Paula, 
and hard by ourselves a magnificent Eng- 
lish seventy-four displayed the white ensign 
of the West Indian Admiral. We had 
surely seen all this before, when in boyish 
days Tom Cringle treated us to the crimes 
and candies of his Caribbean Log ! Funny 
little canopied boats manned by clean, neat 
Spaniards in white jackets, swarmed about 
us, and eager negroes balanced on the 
swinging bows of fragile barquichuelas, 
waved golden bunches of the pendulous 
banana before our wondering eyes. The 
escaping steam shrieked with joy to be re- 
lieved from duty, the hurrying passengers 
besieged the grave polite customs' officers 
who had boarded us, beseeching them to 
grant landing permits for that night, and 
the valets-de-place of the different hotels 
kept shoving cards into everybody's hands. 
Decidedly we had arrived ! 

Soon but two passengers remained on 
board, of the sixty-two who had traversed 
the placid seas in company. The night air 



22 GAN-EDEN. 

in the harbor was so mild, that I could not 
deny myself the delight of dallying a little 
longer with the sober certainty of arrival. 
Weary with the excitement of the day, but 
not otherwise conscious of that great illness 
from which I had so lately escaped, I lay 
on the deck with my pleasant English 
friend. We watched the great moon and 
stars come out into the purple sky. The 
lights glittered one by one at the mast- 
heads of the war ships all over the bay. 
The sounds from the shore grew fainter 
and fainter, and the familiar strains of 
" God save the Queen " coming mellowed 
over the water from the stately English 
ship, were our evening hymn. 



CHAPTER III. 

" Eambling from one inn to another. 



John Locke. 



I had no trouble at the Aduana. " Smith's 
Leading Cases," two delicate octavos in calf- 
skin, attracted the attention of the cour- 
teous official, who removed his cigar to ask 
an explanation ; " Las leyes de Ingla terra 1 " 
I solemnly answered; "Ah si!" and evi- 
dently convinced that a man who could 
not travel without a "Corpus Juris" in his 
portmanteau, must be a miracle of good 
behavior, the Aduanero replaced his cigar, 
waved his hand politely, and passed our 
luggage. I found him afterwards charged 
in the bill, by the polite and excellent An- 
tonio, our Spanish landlord, who had come 
to find us on board of the ship, and to 
pilot us to his house. And what a house ! 
neither English, nor American, nor French; 
a genuine Spanish Posada, colonial indeed, 



24 GAN-EDEN. 

but redolent of the Asturias ! The house 
was once a bishop's palace, and dates from 
the days of Velasquez and Cortez. When 
this house was built, Puritanism was a capi- 
tal joke, and the king of the Spains was 
the Bugaboo of all Anglo- Saxondom. How 
grave and quiet was the company at the 
breakfast table ! the waiters, how good- 
humored without familiarity, how respect- 
ful without servility! An amiable New 
Zealander, my friend and fellow passenger, 
brought me to this place, whither uninitia- 
ted Americans rarely wander. My vigorous 
gratitude ought to reach him at the Antip- 
odes. But for yonder negress, who, with 
a cigar in her mouth, is ironing at a large 
table in the red-tiled back court of this 
second story, I might imagine myself to be 
in that very a venta, que por su mal Don 
Quixote penso que era Castillo ! " that mem- 
orable inn where the four wool-combers 
of Segovia, the three Cordovan leather- 
dressers, and the strollers of Seville, that 
jocose and lively folk tossed Sancho in a 
blanket to pay his master's bill. 



PICTUEES OF CUBA. 25 

The squat stone pillars and low arches of 
the gallery which runs around the hollow 
square of the house, and the green blinds 
which shade that gallery, give a Moorish 
air to the interior. Every pillar is vocal 
with Canary birds. The rooms around the 
gallery have no doors, only large curtains, 
lazily stirred now by the light breeze. The 
red tiles of the inner roofs, the brown stone 
floors, the serious, dignified Spanish faces 
of the two or three guests lounging in the 
huge antiquated saloon, the heavy mahog- 
any chairs, ranged in two opposing ranks 
between the enormous doorway and the 
equally enormous window, and decorated 
each with a coronet of faded gilt, the 
stuffed tropical birds in cases, on the mass- 
ively carved buffet, the queer monkish chan- 
delier dangling from the dark green rafters 
of the high-pitched ceiling, all conspire 
to perfect this scene of warm and in- 
dolent delight. From my balcony of dark 
green wood, I look up the short vista 
of a street about twenty feet wide to a 
government building, an Italian palazzo 
3 



26 GAN-EDEN. 

painted light green, and picked out with 
white, in the Plaza cle Armas, and to the 
sunny garden of the Plaza, gay with 
aloes in full bloom, and fuchsias, and a 
hundred other tropical flowers. Above 
them all rises a marble statue, shaded by 
three noble cocoa-nut palms, whose rich 
plumes of brownish green wave gracefully 
in the light breeze, while their smooth-look- 
ing grayish white trunks gleam brightly in 
the sunshine. 

From the little shops over the way, in 
whose terraced roofs I recognize "the Abode 
of Peace, Bagdad," sally forth novel figures ; 
sometimes a trig little Spaniard in white 
jacket and jaunty sombrero, sometimes a 
stalwart African in no jacket and no hat, 
his rich brown -black skin swelling with the 
tension of such a muscular system as would 
not discredit a lion. Ever and anon, a 
punchy black mule with stiff, erect, close- 
shaven mane, and braided tail tied with gay 
ribbons to the saddle, comes prancing by 
in the shafts of a gorgeous volante, or a 
grey donkey shambles along, and on his 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 27 

back a Creole boy, with smiling kindly 
face, and great black eyes, and warm 
bright complexion, half sitting, half lying 
between two great straw panniers fall of 
oranges or zapotes, or pine-apples, or plan- 
tains. The whole spirit of the place is that 
of a drowsier Spanish Italy. For the laz- 
zaroni, we have the negroes, many of them 
magnificent Africans, the finest specimens 
of the race I ever saw. Their ways are 
infinitely queer. For instance, they use 
their ears for pockets. You see a huge, 
tattooed, bronze Hercules take out a lucifer 
match from behind one ear, and a long 
cigar from behind the other, while small 
silver change gleams in the orifices of 
both. 

I have since gone through a course of 
hotels in Havana. There are khans far 
finer than this Castilian hostelry, far finer, 
and far costlier. There is Le Grand's, out- 
side the walls, that stately Hotel-Restau- 
rant, where bad Bordeaux wine, and worse 
Bordeaux French, make such a mimicry of 
Paris, as suffices to bewilder, and to charm 



28 GAN-EDEN. 

the aspiring youth of Havana. So the 
young cockney, through a small window 
of his own Colosseum gazing, on square 
yards of Alps, and cubic inches of cascade, 
dreams of the Traveller's Club, and fasci- 
nates the listening ear of Clapham, or of 
Pentonville, with tales of bold adventure ! 
Le Grand's,- however, is a truly delightful 
house. Passing by, one night, the aspect 
of the Cafe restaurant, with its marble 
floors, and lofty ceilings, and the Parisian 
elegance of its decorations, and the quiet 
satisfaction visible on the faces of the port- 
ly guests, quite attracted me. I installed 
myself there, and passed a pleasant fort- 
night beneath and upon its hospitable roof. 
That lofty azotea, that great terraced 
housetop, like a watchtower of Asmo- 
deus, commands the roofs of half the city, 
and when the sea-breeze cools the even- 
ing air, a lively little upper world, another 
"realm of the birds," an airy kingdom of 
sauntering youths, and gaily dressed dam- 
sels, comes finely into sight ! In the early 
morning, how lovely is the view from that 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 29 

commanding post ! how delicious the fresh 
breath of the ocean which rolls its broad 
shining flood half-way around the horizon ! 
Algiers seems beneath you to the north, 
the broad promenade and European city 
walls to the south carry the imagination 
away to the Peninsula ; while to the east, 
the vast yellowish masses of the Cabanas, 
and the light-tower of the Morro, mark the 
most individual feature of the scene. A 
fine ship going out under full sail, two or 
three vessels running in from afar, a few 
large birds swaying lazily to and fro, or 
circling overhead, and the clumsy gallop 
of the volante horses below, are rarely 
wanting to give life and animation to a 
scene, which would otherwise be almost 
oppressively still, in the broad tropical 
light. The balconies below, in the early 
evening, look out upon the Paseo Isabel II., 
thronged with all its promenading world. 

One thing only was lacking to my enjoy- 
ment of this admirable house. My cham- 
ber would have been a disgrace to an apart- 
ment au cinquieme in the Eue de la Ver- 
3* 



30 GAN-EDEN. 

rerie. The saloon was a large, long, hand- 
some room, marble floored, and furnished 
in the cool sparing fashion of the country. 
Of the restaurant, I have already spoken. 
But the sleeping rooms of the hotel were 
small, ill-contrived, and vilely furnished. 
An attenuated bed, a dilapidated wash- 
stand, and space for a trunk, limited my 
host's idea of necessary lodging-rooms. To 
be sure this notion was not particular to 
him, but general to the native. Some 
private families, of high respectability, are 
in the habit of turning loose a number of 
cots into their vast saloons at night, for the 
accommodation of some of the multitudi- 
nous members that go to make up a house- 
hold in this prolific region. And at the 
best American hotel in the city, to which 
also I roved, the accommodations were 
such, that I have known more than one 
very worshipful party landed in the morn- 
ing from New York take flight in the 
afternoon for New Orleans, at the mere 
aspect of their sleeping apartment ! In 
truth, one is forced to smile at the ridicu- 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 31 

lous contrast between his expenditure and 
his entertainment. In London or Paris, 
one may spend vast sums of money in the 
purchase of ephemeral satisfactions, and 
magnificent trifles, but the satisfactions, 
however expensive, will be satisfactory, 
and the trifles, however trivial, will be 
magnificent. In Havana, one pays the 
price of luxuries for necessities, and those 
poor of their kind. If a man could live on 
guava jelly and cigars, I suppose he might 
find Havana an economical place ; but if he 
requires any thing else, if he wants bread 
and meat, and water, and a good bed to 
sleep in, let him go to Antioch or Ancona, 
to Brindisi or to Basso rah, rather than to 
Havana. At his hotel he will have to pay 
more than at the best New York houses, 
and if he ever humbly expostulated with 
that feudal baron, his landlord, at the St. 
Nicholas, or the New York, for putting him 
up stairs beyond the reach of waiters, and 
in a room so small that he must go out of 
the window to get into bed, he will repent 
his disloyal murmuring against the fiat of 



32 GAN-EDEN. 

American autocracy, when lie learns that 
the second" bed in his Havana chamber is 
likely at any moment to be tenanted by a 
stranger, and that when two adventitious 
cots have cut off his approach to the wash- 
stand and the looking-glass, a fourth weary 
wanderer just landed from the Chagres 
steamer, may be laid to die of the Isthmus 
fever in his own double bed. This is no 
fancy sketch. "Such things have been." 
Whenever I was lucky enough to have a 
room to myself, I felt the constant anxiety 
of a respited criminal. Now, surely, a car- 
avanserai is much better than this. Far 
better bring one's bed with one, sure of a 
place apart where to lay it down privately 
and peacefully, than sleep on furnished 
down after this fashion. It is quite too 
romantic, and too vividly reminds you of 
Maritornes and the mishaps of the Posada. 
It likes me not, and, in conjunction with 
railroads, is intolerable. Let us have one 
thing or another. If we must sleep four in 
a room, let us travel exclusively afranc-etrier, 
and dine every day under the trees, with 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 33 

strolling actors. But it is sadly inharmoni- 
ous, this juxtaposition of the middle ages 
at our inn with the nineteenth century on 
the road. These sudden changes of mental 
temperature, are trying as those of a New- 
England spring. 



CHAPTER IV, 



Les plaisirs ont leur torn*, 
C'est leur plus doux usage 
Que de finir les soins du jour. 



MOLIEKE. 



It was a high festival day on which I 
first drove out to the Paseos, the Champs 
Elysees of Havana. 

On our way we passed a church, out of 
which was moving the most absurd imagin- 
able religious procession. Let Naples hide 
her diminished head, and Einsiedeln be 
rebuked ! First came four negroes, playing 
the violin, bass-viol, flute, and flageolet, rol- 
ling their eyes, and grinning in an ecstasy 
of jocose importance. Then, boys and men 
carrying candles, and shoving everybody 
aside, like newly appointed policemen. 
Then, a hangdog looking friar in a greasy 
white gown, with cowl thrown back, care- 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 35 

lessly swinging, or rather jerking, a hnge 
censer, and glancing upward, from side to 
side, at the balconies, full of fair Habaneras, 
as he slouched along. Then four men, car- 
rying a gilded canopy, in front of which 
paraded a boy in white, and a priest in 
white silk and gold, bearing the shining 
Host, and followed by another priest, in 
yellow silk and gold. Then "the army 
incog.," blacky white, and yellow. An om- 
nibus, (are there not omnibus-gondolas 
in Venice !) an omnibus got in their way, 
as it was natural such a heretical, modern 
French monstrosity should do. Livid with 
rage, the censer-man, more incensed than 
ever I saw monk before, rushed up, swore 
at the driver, stopped the horses, and turn- 
ed out the passengers. The driver, a good 
looking young Spaniard, bowed, crossed 
himself, shrugged his shoulders, and winked 
at the spectators. The passengers humbly 
gave up, except one grey-haired American 
in spectacles, who fought the priest through 
the window with an umbrella, and was only 
dislodged by the joint and furious swearing 



36 GAN-EDEN. 

of the holy man, and five or six soldiers 
who came to his assistance. I never saw a 
more disgusting scene. 

The Paseos make the most charming of 
promenades. Beyond the walls stretch for 
several miles, broad, well-made roads, bor- 
dered with stately buildings near the city, 
and lined throughout their whole extent 
with fine rows of poplars and of palms. 
Some of these Paseos are adorned with roy- 
al statues, more or less hideous, with foun- 
tains, or with gardens. With the Plaza de 
Armas, the Paseos, and the Alameda, or 
Poplar Walk, de Paula, a delightful well- 
paved walk along a sea-wall, somewhat 
resembling the approach to the Villa Eeale 
at Naples, Havana has received no younger 
sister's portion. The Paseos are the after- 
noon resort of the fine world. There, just 
before sundown, the footways are throng- 
ed with hundreds of young Creole exqui- 
sites, in their eternal uniform of black and 
white, vindicating the universal incongrui- 
ties of fashion, by the substitution of an 
ugly heavy beaver hat for the easy and 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 37 

pretty sombrero of the morning. The eyes 
of all these youths are directed with a per- 
tinacity of impertinence, which at first 
awakens tingling sensations in the toe of a 
Northern boot, upon the countenances and 
persons of the hundreds of young ladies 
who are trotted slowly up and down the 
carriage roads, in the wide and open vo- 
lantes. Soon, however, the conviction forces 
itself upon the stranger, that the young 
ladies cloat upon this impertinence, and will 
be looked at. Certainly the exhibition is a 
wonderfully brilliant one ! Mr. Angus Mc- 
Kaskill, the Nova Scotia giant, and a genu- 
ine Polar Walrus, whose seducing likenesses 
just now adorn the useless city walls, must 
surely solicit the public attention in vain, 
when such a pageant as this is nightly 
open to the world ! The rich sunlight falls 
upon hundreds of beautiful heads, tastefully 
dressed as if for the opera or the ballroom, 
and adorned generally with fine natural 
flowers. The features of the Creole ladies 
are generally good, and the complexions of 
the younger among them, though perfectly 
4 



38 GAN-EDEN. 

pale, are of that rich paleness, that sunny 
hue of antique marble, which distinguished 
the face of Napoleon in his youth. The 
elderly ladies, generally riding sandwiched 
between two younger ones, are not often 
more attractive than Napoleon in his fat 
and flabby age. Barely among the Cuban 
ladies of maturer years, does one see those 
healthy, sweet, and venerable faces which 
so often make old age lovely in the north. 
These dames and damsels are arrayed in the 
most intense colors, fiery red, ultramarine 
blue, gamboge yellow, colors as vivid as 
the hues of the flamingo and the parrot, 
the cactus-flower and the jaquey. But 
these glowing colors belong naturally 
enough to a landscape where all things 
glow, in the heavens and on the earth. 
The line of vol antes is broken at intervals, 
by some ambitious Don fretting his help- 
less, heavily bitted, long-tailed steed into a 
continual caracole, or by the close English 
carriage of some exclusive noble, or enter- 
prising hotel keeper. Gradually the car- 
riages roll off the ground. Sallow inane 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 39 

young men go swinging their canes 
through the gates. The long procession 
of the watchmen, walking two and two 
with lighted lanterns appears, and lo ! it 
is night. Night, which falls not sweetly 
and slowly down around the weary world, 
as in the northern climes, but comes down 
suddenly, almost with a jerk, as if the string 
of a curtain had broken ! At night, the 
tropic world is all awake, all tremulous 
with life and light. The streets within 
the walls are thronged and gay. Then the 
ladies of condition go shopping, and their 
volantes crowd the narrow streets. The 
fair inmates, disdaining to descend, are 
waited on by familiar, yet courteous shop- 
men, Spaniards of old Spain, and masters 
of that courteous familiarity, in which, as in 
so many other graceful traits, the Moor still 
triumphs in the heart of Spain. One feels 
the Orient too, in the equanimity with 
which the dignified dealer in genuine Ee- 
galias, or wonderful fans, condescends to 
waive a trifle of forty or fifty per cent., on 
the original price he had asked for his 



40 GAN-EDEN. 

admirable wares. And do you not seem to 
see that incomparable lady of Bassorah, to 
whom the young silk merchant gave such 
long credit, and loaned such large sums, on 
the mere security of her magnificent eyes, 
when you hear the stately and sounding 
adulation with which these Peninsular 
tradesmen ply their customers, adroitly 
puffing not their goods, but the fair buyers 
thereof? The ecstatic ejaculations which 
burst from the lips of the Persian princes, 
when they first beheld themselves sur- 
rounded by the unveiled Houris of a Lon- 
don drawing-room, are the daily license of 
the young Habanero, nor clo the native 
ladies take any offence at the compliment- 
ary nonsense which salutes their passage 
through the streets. But I shall not soon 
forget the mixture of alarm and indigna- 
tion with which a northern lady of my ac- 
quaintance, sallying from the hotel door for 
her first volante expedition, heard herself 
addressed by two youths, who took off their 
hats in passing, and exclaimed, " Go with 
God ! lovely and beautiful American ! Long 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 41 

live your loveliness, and long live Amer- 
ica!" Yet as she chanced to be very 
pretty, and as America is by no means 
unpopular with the Creoles, she grew quite 
accustomed to such salutations, before the 
ride was over, and even submitted with a 
tolerably good grace to receive the informa- 
tion from a waiter at the Cafe, where she 
stopped to take an ice, "that the ices of 
the beautiful ladies had been paid for, by a 
Caballero who had gone out ! " 

At night, too, the daughters of the mid- 
dling classes, arrayed in their best, stand 
behind the gratings of the huge ground 
floor windows, guiltless of glass, and gaze 
out upon the busy street, while their 
dowdy mammas, in the easiest undress, 
rock slowly in the huge butacas, or arm- 
chairs, which are always arranged in two 
parallel lines from the front windows. The 
promenaders without, so narrow are the 
side-walks, almost brush the dresses of the 
young ladies within, yet the wax-women 
who so obligingly lead the fashions, in 
the shop-windows of Broadway and Wash- 
4* 



42 GAN-EDEN. 

ington street, are not more impassive under 
the stare of rural wonder or delight, than 
are these Creole damsels under the bold 
gaze of native criticism or foreign admi- 
ration, to which they are nightly sub- 
jected. How favorable this arrangement 
is to the commerce in billets doux, I need 
not say, and as the windows are gene- 
rally somewhat bowed, I have even wit- 
nessed exchanges of a more tender nature, 
made through the gratings. At night the 
Plaza cle Armas is in its glory. The Plaza 
de Armas is not so large as Hyde Park, 
neither does it at all resemble the Battery ; 
and those wise people who disdain Drachen- 
fels, for its little likeness to Anthony's 
Nose, and despise Windermere, because it 
is but a teacup beside the great wash-tub 
of Lake Erie, find the Plaza de Armas 
neither fair nor pleasing. Yet it seems to 
me a charming place, with its picturesque 
frontiers of Southern buildings, and its cita- 
del of marble quiet, when the hot noon 
broods above its silent palms, and still, 
dreaming, odorous flowers. A charming 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 43 

place, suggesting recollections more charm- 
ing still of lovelier places, of the gardens of 
King Agib, and of the courts wherein 
" Ganem, the Distracted Slave of Love/' 
recited extemporaneous verses to the dark- 
eyed Alcolomb. And at night the Plaza de 
Armas has new charms of its own. Then 
the regimental bands gathered around the 
conspicuous marble statue of Ferdinand. 
VII., discourse most passionate music ; then, 
moving groups of ladies in mantillas, and 
caballeros, (alas that I must write it !) in 
black dress coats and white pantaloons, 
chequer the rich moonlight on the mar- 
ble pavements, and swarthy slaves glancing 
with ornaments of silver and of gold, lean 
over the low walls, bandying their chuck- 
ling wit in their strange negro Spanish; 
and half hidden in the broad shadows of the 
buildings round about the Plaza, dark-eyed 
Alcolombs receive the homage of meeker 
and less ecstatic Ganems, assiduous beside 
those wondrous vehicles, which, to the lady 
of Havana, are gondola and throne, fauteuil 
and palanquin at once. 

At nine o'clock the bands march off the 



44 GAN-EDEN. 

ground. The volant es follow, and the aim- 
less masculine world repairs to the Cafes. 
The Cafes are stately squares of marble 
columns, open in the centre to the airs of 
heaven, and refreshed with the plashing of 
fountains. There the representatives of 
half the nations of the world are to be 
found, the heavy moustachio of the Span- 
ish dragoon, and the ruddy, clean shaven 
visage of the English middy, equally active 
in the discussion of all manner of new and 
fragrant compounds, cool with Northern 
ice, and aromatic with the life of tropic 
fruits. There, oysters are a costly luxury, 
and pineapples are a drug, and nobody 
reads the newspaper. An uproarious con- 
fusion of tongues, the continual ringing 
from the little silver braziers, which the 
unwearied waiters clatter down upon the 
marble tables in answer to the perpetual 
cries of « Candela ! Candela !" (Fire ! Fire !) 
which echo through the building, and a 
ceaseless movement to and fro in the bright 
gas-light distinguish the world of men with- 
in. Without, the ladies in their volantes 
take ices, and a little more gallantry. 



CHAPTER V. 

" Spectacles, bals, festins, concerts, conversations." 

Gil Blas at Lirias. 

People in the tropics rarely perpetrate 
those wild excesses with which the north- 
ern races warm their frozen blood. The 
tropics are the home of temperance and 
regularity. The very winds are always 
methodical in their madness, and give man- 
kind timely notice of their intended orgies, 
like that considerate nobleman, who used 
to announce to his friends, " Next Thursday, 
by the blessing of Heaven, I propose to be 
drunk." The life of a Habanero dandy is 
as systematic as that of a New England 
deacon. The morning, whether passed in a 
bataea, or behind a desk in one of those 
enormous marble-floored counting-houses, 
which give such a princely air to the mer- 
cantile life of Havana, is passed quietly and 



46 GAN-EDEN. 

calmly. The afternoon melts impercep- 
tibly away at one of those Creole dinner- 
tables, where luxury of equipage and 
entertainment so harmoniously combines 
with perfect simplicity of manners to fur- 
nish a meal, which, like the suppers of 
Plato, is " a pleasure not for the moment 
only, but for many succeeding days." Then 
comes the serene lounge in the balcony, 
with some domestic charmer, or the saunter 
along the crowded Paseo. The evening 
belongs to the Plaza de Armas, or to the 
corridor of the Opera House. Should a 
ball or a party break the uniformity of this 
routine, the preparation for such a festival 
involves no such expenditure of thought 
and labor, as the assiduous Northerner under- 
goes in a like case. The prevailing expres- 
sion of equanimity which distinguishes the 
Creole face, testifies to the facility with 
which the Creole lives. Plainly the Creole 
wastes upon the economic and moral ends 
of human life, no more thought than is 
bestowed upon the great corn-grinding 
and board-sawing mission of all running 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 47 

waters, by the lazy streams and streamlets 
that go dancing and dawdling on for miles 
through the savage woodland. The Creole 
dandy, (compassionate him, oh thou his 
serious Northern brother!) drifts slowly 
down his sluggish canal of life without a 
dream of struggle or endeavor. Some- 
times he riots in a melodious operatic rage ; 
but the wave rises highest in his heart, 
whenever the Dulcinea of the moment 
makes his encircling arm her stay in the 
slow, graceful whirl of that delicious contra- 
danza, which is the rhythmic utterance of 
his warm languid life. Oh ! how wooingly, 
how trancingly floats now through my 
memory, the soft enthralling music of that 
luxurious dance ! a mystery as strange and 
sweet as is all that, life so alien from our 
own ? which flavors the tropic world ! It is 
the dance of Cuba, and the children of 
Cuba alone have its secret. You can al- 
ways detect the foreigner through all the 
grace and all the precision of his step. The 
dance is the earliest and most national of 
national lyrics. The Tarantella, maddening 



48 GAN-EDEN. 

on the moonlit sands of Sorrento; the 
Cachucha, inspiring every limb of the ar- 
dent daughter of Andalusia; the contra- 
dansa, pouring the plaintive passion of its 
wailing cadences through every nerve and 
vein of the pale, dark-eyed Creoles, till the 
very music seems to come from them, 

" And all the notes appear to be 
The echoes of their feet : " 

these may all be felt, but cannot be fathom- 
ed by the stranger. The measure of the 
coniradanza always brought before me vis- 
ions of" the mild-eyed melancholy" Indians, 
of that soft, unwarlike people to whom 
life was one sweet song and breathing 
dance in this fair island, before the greedy 
Spaniard came with traffic and with toil, 
to sweep them from the earth. The 
music of the Indian names and words 
which the conquerors have preserved, is 
kindred in character with the measure of 
the contradanza. Guanabacoa., Camarioca, 
Baracoa, Guanajay, guahavana, guayava; 
the soft delaying flow of such words as 
these revives for us the whole spirit of the 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 49 

vanished people, to whom to die was easier 
than to work. Long may it be before the 
camp dances of the big-booted Sclavoni- 
ans, or the mincing absurdities of the diplo- 
matic quadrille, shall banish from the 
saloons of Cuba, their own most graceful 
and expressive measure ! 

The present customs of the land in 
regard to the intercourse of the young 
people, are a great shield to the contradanza. 
The youths and maidens could not spare 
it. Every Cuban young lady is carefully 
secluded from the approaches of "young 
Cuba," by a system of modified duenna- 
dom. On the Paseo, and particularly on 
the Plaza de Armas, the shepherd may in- 
deed converse with his nymph, but always 
under the eye of her dragon, and the third 
visit of Lycidas to Chloris, subjects him to a 
tete-a-tete with Chloris mere, and to a spe- 
cific investigation into his intentions. The 
mazes of the contradanza alone are free, and 
in that brief season of sunshine, flirtations 
spring up like flowers in the fleeting Scan- 
dinavian summer. 

5 



50 GAN-EDEN. 

Social entertainments at Havana borrow 
a great charm, too, from the spaciousness 
and airiness of the houses. The lofty ceil- 
ings, the long capacious rooms, the huge 
windows opening upon moonlit balconies, 
lend to the balls and parties of Havana an 
air of ease and amplitude, which makes 
them seem more social, and more enter- 
taining too, than the "jams" of the North. 
The ladies, when not dancing, to be sure, 
are apt to run to the walls, and the gentle- 
men to eddy around the door-posts, after a 
fashion usually regarded as Anglo-Saxon, 
yet which is quite as much in vogue among 
the Southern nations, as in London or Bos- 
ton. But conversation, however trivial, 
is here more freely carried on, and one is 
not oppressed with the sensual horrors of 
supper as in the States. The climate, too, 
compels the men, in particular, to dress 
more rationally, and you never see a sweet 
temper soured by tight boots, or a noble 
nature humbled under the tyranny of a 
shirt-collar. A party at Havana is some- 
thing more than a congress of polking 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 51 

children, and oyster-eating adults. What- 
ever refreshments are offered, are always 
better calculated to revive, than to stun 
the system ; and I should think that a fort- 
night of " the season " at New York would 
be more detrimental to body and mind, 
than months of gaiety in the Southern 
capital. The u tertulia," which is the more 
common form of entertainment in Havana, 
is very simple, and much less trying than 
a tea-party. It is, in fact, nothing but a 
kind of " reception." The capital required 
for a Northern " reception," being mainly a 
pair of black pantaloons, and a perpetual 
smile, for a Cuban tertulia, a perpetual 
smile, and a pair of white pantaloons will 
suffice. 

The easiest and pleasantest form of social 
life at Havana, however, is the great, gene- 
ral " tertulia " of the entr' actes at the Opera 
House. Everybody knows that the Tacon 
Theatre is the largest in America, and one 
of the largest in the world. Madame Cal- 
deron familiarized us with the splendors of 
its appearance, to which, indeed, that lively 



52 GAN-EDEN. 

lady did no more than justice. The well- 
dressed pit relieves, with masses of black 
and white, the variegated glitter of the 
boxes. Inclosed only by a slender gilded 
railing, these boxes display very finely the 
flashing eyes, and flashing diamonds, the 
dark tresses, and flowing- dresses of fair 
Havana. Each box contains a family party 
with a seat or two to spare, and throughout 
the evening each family receives visitors, 
who wander around the great cool passage- 
ways, peep through the latticed partitions, 
and spend their evenings as that ancient 
bachelor his mornings, " in making dodging 
calls, and wriggling round among the 
ladies." When the spectacle within grows 
tedious, you wander into those great corri- 
dors, refreshed with breezes that blow 
through enormous windows, and throng- 
ed with animated groups. Impertinent 
looking soldiers in their white uniforms 
stalk majestically about, shoving the Cre- 
oles, and making way for foreigners, while 
at the open door of every box " obsequious 
darkness waits " in gold-laced livery. It is 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 53 

more sad than amusing, however, to witness 
one feature of this brilliant spectacle. The 
Creole children, in too many cases, shock 
the eye by their costume, and their man- 
ners, more than they win it by their 
beauty of person and of feature. One 
rarely sees a positively ugly child in Ha- 
vana. But quite as rarely does one see a 
childly child. It is one of the sad conse- 
quences of the system of social life in the 
Island, that children associated with their 
mothers in the ballroom, the dining-room, 
and the theatre, from the tenderest years, 
that they may escape the contamination of 
slave influence, are forced into a precocity, 
compared with which the sophistication of 
Punch's immortal juveniles resembles the 
innocence of the babes in the wood. And 
there they are at the Opera House, mirror- 
ing "the greater audience in an audience 
less," the absurd little boys in tight body- 
coats and high hats, swinging jewelled canes, 
the girls laced, fringed, flounced like their 
mammas, flirting, too, like them, their costly 
fans with the imitated air, and too often 



54 GAN-EDEN. 

with the genuine expression of the matur- 
est coquetry. Over them the moralist 
drops a* tear. The hopeful traveller re- 
calls with grateful heart the memory of 
other little ones, more in number, too, 
than the Piper left in Hamelin, in whose 
bright eyes childhood laughed, whose red 
lips budded only in the sinless smile of 
happy infancy, and thereupon, beholds the 
Cuban future shine more cheerily upon his 
thought. 

This winter Havana has had no Italian 
troupe. I should have been glad to see 
one of those deifications, which have so 
easily won for Havana the reputation of 
being a very musical city. A StefFanoni, 
crowned with silver, and pelted with jewels, 
a Marini, ranting in regal state, would have 
been a sight worth seeing. The applauses 
of such an audience as Havana could 
furnish, must come down like a tropical 
shower, uncliscriminating, fierce, and appall- 
ing. For while the musical cultivation 
of Havana is evidently very imperfect, the 
Creole nature and the Creole education 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 55 

must make the Habaneros very suscep- 
tible of the titillating influence of merely 
sensuous music. One would not look 
here for such an intelligent and judicial 
furore as those that have so often shaken 
the walls of the Fenice and La Scala, of 
the Pergola and San Carlo, but a gushing, 
irrational, dispenclious enthusiasm is always 
entertaining to the calmer spectator. It is 
pleasant to see how much the Creoles en- 
joy the very indifferent music which they 
like. The Clubs of Havana (for the Eng- 
lish club-house has wandered further than 
the Chinese herb, or the Arabian berry, and 
has undergone as many culinary modifica- 
tions as they,) partake of the character of 
Philharmonic Societies. It was very agree- 
able to see this innovation upon the bearish 
system of the club-house, and though the 
performances were ordinary enough, and 
the programmes such as are now served up 
only for the delectation of second-rate New 
England towns, the extravagant, and evi- 
dently sincere enjoyment of the audiences 
quite won my sympathies. The music sell- 



56 GAN-EDEN. 

ers in the town, too, though their shelves 
would have driven a genuine Mendels- 
sohnian of Boston quite wild with disgust, 
seemed to be doing a more extensive busi- 
ness than I should have fancied possible, 
in a community where aesthetic cultiva- 
tion generally is at so low an ebb. Ger- 
man and classical Italian music are in very 
little demand, but Donizetti and Verdi must 
weep and howl by turns, through a third 
of the better houses of Havana. This is 
very well for a city where you cannot pur- 
chase a decent box of colors, or a tolerable 
drawing-book. 

And I was really surprised to hear that 
Jenny Lind had not paid her expenses in 
Havana. For it required hardly more than 
the sense of hearing to fit persons of merely 
average capacity for the enjoyment of her 
delicious singing, at once so singular and 
so simple was it in its excellence. What 
mattered the cloud of humbug from which 
the angelic accents issued ? Had she been 
conducted by a company of Connecticut 
clock-makers; had she been pardoned out 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 57 

of the galleys, I should not have supposed 
that any tolerably educated public could be 
insensible to the fascinations of her voice 
and her method. 



CHAPTER VI. 

" Sta d' alta torre, e scopre i monti e i campi." 



Tasso. 



Few persons expect to find much beauty 
in the environs of Havana. Yet few cities 
of the New World can compare in this 
respect with the Cuban capital. It was my 

good fortune to fall in with S , the 

grave scenery-hunting German painter, 
who, after filling portfolio upon portfolio 
with visions of Egypt and the East, of 
Europe and of Africa, had wandered hither 
on his way to Yucatan and Mexico. In 
his company I spent many a delightful 
hour upon the fine sloping hills which sur- 
round the city. The suburbs, of Eegla 
where the foreign ships anchor, and the 
admirable storehouses stand, Jesus del 
Monte, Griianabacoa, which claims to be 
an old Indian town, where Caciques ruled 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 59 

and the terrible Cemis was worshipped, 
and the Cerro, are all interesting in them- 
selves; and offer various and noble views of 
the city and the bay. The Dane in the 
Improvisatore who exclaims as the dili- 
gence rolls into Itri, that dirt and the pic- 
turesque are inseparable, would rejoice over 
these ancient villages, so solid at once and 
so squalid. Such rich browns and blacks 
in the interiors! Such fine besmooched 
red roofs! Guanabacoa is the most fash- 
ionable watering-place of the Island dur- 
ing the summer months. The lavish in- 
stincts of the Creole nature, and the opu- 
lence of Cuban society, are then displayed 
in all their brilliancy. In the winter the 
old Indian city is a quiet, dreamy, deserted 
place, as dull as a dead moth. You may 
reach it by a charming road which runs 
around the bay, or, more appropriately, by 
a kind of decayed railway, from which the 
noise and the speed of the engine have 
vanished, as the glitter and the chatter of 
young life from this Newport of the Cubans. 
Tired mules haul the faded, battered, soli- 



60 GAN-EDEN. 

tary car along the worn and shaking rails. 
But however you may reach them, the hills 
of Guanabacoa disclose a prospect which 
roused the enthusiasm even of the firm and 
patriotic New "Yorker, whose pleasant com- 
pany made more pleasant my first visit to 
the spot, and who loved the magnificent 
harbor of his own city, as warmly and as 
wisely as its glorious loveliness deserves. 
The Cerro is a suburb nearer the citv, and 
full of villas. In the soft evening light, the 
drive thither is delicious ; the landscape 
quite East Indian in character, made up of 
houses with overhanging eaves, groves of 
palm-trees, Brahminee bulls, such as lord it 
over Benares, and Chinese coolies. The 
villas, qidntas they are called here, are built 
in a large palatial style of architecture, with 
charming gardens, and as you go sway- 
ing along in your volante, ever and anon 
sweeping views break on you of the rich 
exuberantly verdant country, of the for- 
tress-crowned heights, and of the blue trem- 
bling of the distant ocean. Not less deli- 
cious is it in the hot noon, when all the city 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 61 

dozes, to take shelter in your shaded vo- 
lante from the vertical rays of the sun, and, 
driving off at a pace which quickens the 
air into a breeze, to seek the refreshing 
green of the quinta gardens. The nobles 
to whom most of these gardens belong, 
courteously throw them open to the public. 
The gardens are much neglected, but open- 
handed nature lavishes her savage beauty 
upon them. Gorgeous flowers, fruit-trees 
like the zapote and the aguacate, that rival 
shade trees in their size and their masses of 
foliage, sublime palm avenues, these and 
the pleasant air make a morning's ramble in 
these places one of the most agreeable feat- 
ures of Havana life. The queer old negro 
gardener of the Quinta de Palatino, hob- 
bling through "the crisped shades and 
bowers," with his sweet burden of clustering 
flowers, is a pleasant figure- in the memory 
of many a Northern heart. I can but hint 
at the charms of that free and genial hospi- 
tality which has made the name of the 
Cerro musical in many ears. Stately 
ceyba of the Bishop's garden, long maj^ 
6 



62 GAN-EDEN. 

thy lordly benediction welcome companies 
as courteous and as gay, as those with 
whom I wiled away the careless hours 
about the buttressed majesty of thy co- 
lossal trunk ! Towering palms of Palatino, 
may the smiles of Heaven never fail upon 
your sweeping leaves, the smiles of glad- 
dened human hearts beneath your grace- 
ful arches ! 

There are fine drives, too, out to Puentes 
Grandes, or the " High Bridge," where the 
green Almendares, the Guaclalquiver of the 
Havana poets, glides under the hanging 
groves, and past the sentimental canas 
hravas of lordly grounds, so stealthily you 
see not its swiftness, till its seaward course 
is impeded, and its speed betrayed by a 
ledge of rocks, over which it leaps angrily 
enough in a series of small cascades ; or to 
the tangled, treacherous mangroves of the 
Chorera, where the same Almendares slips 
quietly out into the Gulf. And lovely" is 
the row by moonlight across the landlocked 
bay, dotted all over by the stately forms 
of ships sleeping on the tide ! 



PICTUEES OF CUBA. 63 

But perhaps the finest excursions around 
Havana, are to be made to the different 
fortresses. The city is excellently fortified, 
particularly on the seaward side. The 
Morro Castle and the Cabanas, if properly 
manned and armed, might defy the largest 
fleet, so narrow is the entrance to the har- 
bor, and so commanding is their position. 
When the English took Havana in 1762, 
they landed their troops at two points, east 
and west of the city. At one of these points 
an insignificant fortification, called the Eng- 
lish fort, is still standing near the mouth of 
the Cogimar river. Since that time the ad- 
ditional forts of Principe and Atares have 
been erected, so that Havana has become 
more defensible against land attacks. But 
none of these fortresses are adequately gar- 
risoned, nor can they possibly be so with the 
force which Spain usually maintains in the 
Island. When the troops were sent from 
Havana to fight the battle of Las Pozas, 
the fortresses were left in so unprotected a 
state, that a few resolute young men might 
have made themselves masters of the city. 



64 GAN-EDEN. 

I enjoyed very favorable opportunities for 
visiting the great strongholds of the Morro 
and the Cabanas in company with Capt. 

, a most amiable and accomplished 

officer of the Spanish army, and spent two 
mornings there very delightfully. The as- 
pect of the massive walls, as you approach 
them in your boat, is very imposing, and 
the solid masonry which commands the 
winding ascent to the fortresses is truly 
Cyclopean. One wall of this inclined plane 
is formed by the solid rocks, and the pas- 
sage is completely commanded by the em- 
brasures of numerous batteries. But it is 
only when you have passed the last of the 
heavy gateways, and traversed the broad 
burning square within, and mounted the 
huge parapets, that you begin to appre- 
ciate fully the grandeur and extent of forti- 
cations which well support the hard earned 
fame of the Spaniards as builders, and quite 
throw into the shade even the defences of 
Quebec. It is said that the building of the 
Cabanas cost forty millions of dollars, .a sum 
which startled even the stupid Charles III., 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 65 

who, on receiving the account, is reported 
to have taken up his spy-glass, and to have 
commenced a careful survey of the horizon. 
On being asked what object he sought, the 
King answered that he was looking for the 
Cabanas, which he certainly ought to be 
able to see at any distance. 

The quarters of my friend the Captain, 
were low and by no means extensive, yet 
the walls are of such immense thickness 
that they must be as cool as a cavern. A 
few gardens, carefully cultivated in different 
parts of the vast inclosure, and a marble 
monument raised to commemorate the 
" Valor and Loyalty," of the brave who fell 
in beating back Lopez and his crew, are the 
only ornaments of these gigantic walls. 
But the view from the battlements is glori- 
ous. Far clown below you, wall beneath 
wall, stretch the huge defences, in the whole 
so lofty that the stately vessels at anchor in 
the bay beneath, show like shallops. The 
closely crowded, diversified buildings of the 
populous city, that seemed so many and so 
great, when you walked the narrow streets, 
6* 



66 GAN-EDEN. 

occupy the smallest space of the vast land- 
scape opened to your sight ! 

Between the Cabanas and the Morro 
Castle, lies an undulating, bare, and rocky 
space of ground, a sort of sheepwalk. There 
are subterranean communications, also, be- 
tween the two fortresses. The entrance to 
the Morro Castle, on the side of the Ca- 
banas, is steep, sudden, and very striking, 
the surrounding ditches deep and tremen- 
dous. The fortification itself is much less 
extensive than the Cabanas, of which how- 
ever it is practically but an outwork. Yet 
to the unprofessional visitor, the Morro is 
the more interesting of the two, from its 
more castellated character, and its superb 
position. Standing on the outer parapets, 
you may look over them sheer down into 
the sea, which, notwithstanding its great 
depth, is here so surprisingly clear, that 
even from this great height, objects may be 
clearly discerned upon the bottom. The 
sea-view from the splendid and admirably 
appointed light-house of the Morro, can 
hardly be surpassed. 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 67 

The visible armament of the Morro, like 
that of the Cabanas, is certainly inadequate. 
The famous cannon called the "Twelve 
Apostles/' are heavy guns, but they seemed 
to me to be in a not much better condition 
than the other ecclesiastical institutions of 
the Colony. Ten thousand men, at least, 
would be required to defend these vast for- 
tifications. At no time during my stay in 
Cuba, was the Spanish force in all the 
island, reckoned at more than 13,000 men 
by the most competent judges. Properly 
to man all the forts around Havana, includ- 
ing Principe, Atares, La Punta, and other 
lesser defences, not less than 15,000 men 
would be necessary. Principe and Atares 
are both of them important and consider- 
able posts. Atares has obtained a melan- 
choly celebrity as the scene of the great 
military execution which followed the de- 
feat of Lopez. 

A precise knowledge of the plans and 
outlines of these fortresses cannot easily be 
obtained, for the Spanish authorities are as 
rigidly severe as the Austrians in their hos- 



68 GAN-EDEN. 

tility to sketch-books. A friend of mine 
was staying at the same hotel with a young 
Englishman, one of the devotees of Bristol- 
board, whom you meet all over the world, 
putting in the Pyramids in sepia, touching 
up the Coliseum with burnt sienna and 
flake-white, washing over the vale of Interla- 
chen with a flood of sap-green. The young 
Briton, who had made himself, as pleasant 
young Britons are apt to do, quite the life 
of the house, sallied out one morning for a 
dab at the Bay, but returned not to his 
dinner, nor yet to sleep, nor with the next 
morning. The day wore on, and as he did 
not appear, some of his fellow-lodgers had 
begun to think of looking after him, when a 
messenger arrived to say, that the lover of 
nature was lodged in the Morro Castle, and 
had sent for his Consul and for clean linen. 
The gallant old representative of England 
was soon on the alert, and discovered that 
his young countryman had been seen 
sketching the Morro from a boat, brought 
to by a sentinel, arrested, and by reason of 
his ignorance of the Spanish tongue, incon- 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 69 

tinently shut up. It required all the good 
sense and the courage of the Consul to con- 
vince the authorities that the liegeman of 
Victoria had no designs upon the dominions 
of Isabella, although on the evidence of the 
sketch itself, nobody could ever have con- 
victed its author of attempting to portray 
the outlines of the Morro. A similar inci- 
dent, terminating more agreeably, occurred 
to a German gentleman quite recently. 
The base of the hill on which Atares stands, 
is leased to a market gardener. Our Ger- 
man being in the neighborhood one day, 
was struck with the odd appearance of the 
crooked wooden plough, still used to scratch 
up the rich soil of Cuba. He had nearly 
transferred the object to his sketch book, 
when he was pounced upon by a corporal, 
and led off into the presence of the com- 
manding officer. For some time all passed 
in dumb show, till a German soldier in the 
fort being sent for, explained the affair. 
" If the corporal charges me with sketching 
the fortress," said the German, "let him 
produce his proofs ! " " The proofs are here, 



70 GAN-EDEN. 

Senor!" cried the delighted subofficer, and 
he exhibited the captured sketch book. A 
single glance at the drawing sufficed to 
satisfy the commander, who burst into a fit 
of laughter, dismissed his sagacious subordi- 
nate with a reprimand, and invited the 
German to dinner. 

These fortresses serve as prisons for polit- 
ical . offenders, and there is rarely a time 
when their dungeons are unoccupied. Be- 
yond a doubt men have been brought to 
trial and to military execution within 
these walls, whose fate is still a mystery to 
their friends and families. It is very easy 
to exaggerate the atrocities committed by 
a despotic government, but it is certainly 
idle to question facts which are. involved in 
the very being of such a government. The 
traditional Spaniard of Anglo-Saxon and 
Protestant countries, the legacy of Alva and 
the Inquisition, of the Armada and the wars 
of the Spanish main, is indeed an absurd 
and frightful creature, quite out of nature. 
But a tyrannical system makes tyrannical 
measures, and tyrannical men. Moreover 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 71 

what Leigh Hunt somewhere says is not 
unfounded, that the Spanish character is 
less truly European than that of any other 
w r estern people. 

The walk along the shore beyond the 
Morro to the English fort, and the Cogi- 
mar, is very interesting. The formation of 
the coast is singular. The coralline rocks, 
broken and jagged, are in color very like 
the old red sandstone, of which some 
English cathedrals are built, and in shape 
resembles masses of dead iron such as are 
flung out of old furnaces, or the heaps of 
scoriae which encumber the sides of Etna 
and Vesuvius. They are overlaid and 
strewn with innumerable fragments of 
coral, exquisite sea fans, and sea shells often 
very beautiful, but generally much shatter- 
ed and worn by the waves. The sea-view 
is magnificent. The promontory and towers 
of the Morro, conceal the city ; and as far 
as the eye can range, nothing is visible but 
the widening deep blue waters of the Gulf, 
save when a huge bird goes swaying 
through the air, or a gallant ship scuds 



72 GAN-EDEN. 

along the horizon, or the great gold ball of 
the Sun sinks out of sight in the floods of 
the west, impurpled by his last rays. 

Lonely, wild, and solemn, are now these 
rugged beaches. But time rolls on, and 
the prophetic eye saddens to discern the 
day, when where the Morro Castle now 
frowns defiance from its sombre rock, a 
huge white many-windowed b.uilding with 
broad piazzas, and multitudinous Ionic col- 
onnades- may rear its ghastly form ! Where 
the weary sentinel paces his solitary round, 
the polka will be then madly danced by 
beardless boys and brainless girls, to the 
music of Dodsworth's band. The irregular 
shores over which the searcher after shells 
and stones, now picks his careful way, well 
beaten into a capital road, will mock the 
tossing foam of the sea, with the manes of 
fast horses urged to speed by faster men in 
trotting wagons, and the summer glory of 
Newport and Nahant, will be outshone 
through all the winter months, by the 
splendid follies of the Castle Morro Hotel ! 



CHAPTER VII. 

" To still retreats, and flowery solitudes.' 



Thomson. 



It is not an easy thing to get away from 
Havana. There is a story that when Prince 
William Henry of England was here, as a 
gay midshipman with Kodney, he came on 
shore to dine, and stayed so obstinately, 
that the Admiral could only compel his 
return by threatening to sail without him. 
So mighty are the charms of the Creole 
hospitality. But there is another difficulty 
in the way. You cannot quit Havana 
without a passport, renewable at the end 
of your journey, and if you wish to go 
anywhere by railway, you must rise in 
time to walk out of town, about a mile, to 
the railway station, before six o'clock, a. m. 
More trains pass over one of our great 
northern roads in a day than are run in a 
7 



74 GAN-EDEN. 

week on all the roads of Cuba. Between 
Havana and Matanzas, the New York and 
Boston of the island, there are but two 
trains run, one each way daily, and those 
leave their respective cities at 6, a. m. Un- 
der these circumstances, one cannot but be 
profoundly impressed by the sagacity of a 
regulation which forbids the volantes to 
appear in the streets before seven o'clock ! 
When I at last resolved to see the interior 
of the island, I rose by candlelight, took 
the inevitable morning cup of coffee, and 
having put my portmanteau into a large 
basket, saw the same shouldered and then 
headed by a giant African, w r ho started off 
with it at a rapid trot. Things at the 
railway station passed much as in America, 
for in Cuba you have all the annoyances 
and. none of the comforts of despotism. 
The cars had a familiar look, having been 
built in those long port-holed edifices, which, 
when transfigured by distance and the sun- 
set light, seem to the romantic traveller 
over the West Boston bridge, quite as pic- 
turesque as the barracks of Naples, or the 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 75 

palaces of Portici. We ran — no, we mov- 
ed at a calm, dignified pace, through a beau- 
tiful country, fertile and well-tilled, past 
orchards of fine fruit-trees, among which 
the dark glistening leaves and shining 
globes, the "golden lamps in a green 
night" of the orange, and the conical, 
dwarfish proportions of the pine-apple were 
best known to me, on to the station of San 
Felipe, a sort of Grand Junction, where we 
made a halt, and were regaled with all 
manner of fruits, the oranges being by far 
the best I had tasted in the island. Beyond 
San Felipe, groves of the bushy-topped 
cocoa-palm, and hedges of the plumy beau- 
tiful bamboo appeared. We reached at last 
the Almacen of Batabano, a place half bil- 
liard room and half Posada, and there, at 
the end of an immensely long pier, lay a 
great, white, neat Yankee-looking steamer, 
the General Concha, the pride of the 
Southern coast. I afflicted five gentlemen 
in shirt sleeves, by declining their several in- 
vitations to eat up their savory breakfast 
of beefsteaks, which had been first stewed 



76 GAN-EDEN. 

with garlic, and then fried in butter ; criti- 
cally examined an interesting series of 
highly-colored prints representing the con- 
quest of Mexico, as well as authentic por- 
traits of five European sovereigns, of Gene- 
ral Jose de la Concha, and of a heroic Ser- 
geant of Lancers, who fell valiantly at Las 
Pozas, after transfixing fourteen of the 
"pirates and robbers;" and accurately sur- 
veyed the upper and lower decks of the 
handsome steamer, consuming in this way 
about two hours, at the end of which time 
our worthy little Captain "concluded to 
start," We steamed off into a perfectly 
calm tropical sea. The deck was crowded 
with Monteros in their huge cloaks, silver- 
hilted swords, and deerskin shoes, who 
stalked loftily about among the wretched 
groups of hospital patients, numbers of 
whom are yearly sent by a truly benevo- 
lent society of Havana, to the medicinal 
baths of San Diego. The cabin was filled 
with passengers of a higher and undis- 
tinguished grade, whose cigars and expecto- 
rations conspired, with the whole aspect of 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 77 

the vessel and her decorations, to make me 
feel quite at home. The berths alone were 
novel. These, instead of any mattress or 
sheet, revealed nothing but a stout piece of 
admirably tanned brown hide, stretched 
along the bottom, and furnishing a cool 
and elastic couch perfectly adapted to the 
climate. After dinner, a Spanish dinner, 
served with gravity, and discussed with 
a composure and goodbreeding which I 
am sorry to say did not remind me of simi- 
lar scenes at home, we walked the deck, 
the little old Captain and myself, till sun- 
set, admiring the fine outline of the moun- 
tains of the Vuelta Abajo, which we kept 
in sight all the afternoon. At dark the 
gambling began. The Spaniards play con- 
stantly, but with moderation, and the game 
of Monte was carried on by the majority 
of the passengers all the evening with no 
noise, and in a solemn good-humored way. 
But moonlight against Monte, I went on 
deck. The night was unspeakably beauti- 
ful. The Isla de Pinos, ancient haunt of 
pirates, lay dusky and dim on the South- 
7* 



78 GAN-EDEN. 

ern horizon, quiet was in the air and on 
the sea, no sail in sight. Swiftly, almost 
stealthily, we glided over the tranquil 
waters, the shining treacherous waters, so 
often cloven by the keels of fierce and cruel 
robbers. That sense of something evil in 
the air, which haunts the heart at Naples, 
came upon me. The divine South is full of 
sadness. But the feeling of which I speak, 
is like the shudder of life at the touch of 
Death. Then, this delicious beauty, warm, 
glowing, luxurious, seems to us a Lamia, a 
Melusina ; the woman vanishes, the loathly 
serpent chills us with her clammy, poison- 
ous coil. Is it because, as Landor says, " The 
heart is hardest in the softest climes," and 
these lovely lands are charged with a 
weight of frightful memories ? Or must we 
not look more deeply, into the very consti- 
tution of our natures? In the tropics all 
lower life, the life of vegetables, the phys- 
ical life of animals, nay, of man himself, 
nourishes, the life of the affections and the 
intellect, the life of the kingly passions in 
man alone degenerates. There is the 



PICTURES OP CUBA. 79 

realm of matter. The elements are in 
alliance with our bodies. The throne of 
the high powers within us is threatened. 
We become suddenly conscious of the possi- 
ble divorce between the spirit and the flesh. 
Our dream of the Fountain of Youth 
grows sensual, and the spirit trembles for 
its dominion. Whatever be their source, 
such feelings were crowding on me, when 
a new direction was given to my mind by 
the sudden stoppage of our steamer. We 
had stuck fast in the fango, Anglice' mud, 
for the shores of this part of the coast shoal 
out very gradually into the sea. This Mis- 
sissippian feature in iny sea-voyage I had 
not anticipated. Our little Captain came 
aft and told us it was a quite uncertain " 
when we should get off again ; the engine 
was stopped, and the passengers as com- 
posedly as if they expected to remain sta- 
tionary till the summer rains should fall, 
gathered about the tables in the saloon, 
without one exclamation of impatience or 
dissatisfaction, and began to play Monte 
more assiduously than before. Finding 



80 GAN-EDEN. 

that all the berths had been taken during 
our stay at Batabano, I was preparing to 
" turn in" upon a sofa, when a young Span- 
iard came up to me, and insisted on my 
taking his place. I was a foreigner, he 
said, and he, though not a native, yet a resi- 
dent of the island, and if I would not take 
his berth, nobody should occupy it. Famil- 
iar as I had already become with the grace- 
ful courtesy of his people, this self-sacrific- 
ing politeness seemed to me extraordinary. 
At home I fear I should have distrusted it, 
which is hardly a compliment to our own 
race. But there was no doubting the sin- 
cerity and disinterestedness of this young 
Castilian. 

Whatever may be the charms of the 
game of Monte to the players, it is cer- 
tainly the most soothing of games to the 
spectators. It consists apparently in a 
monotonous iteration of numerals. " Sesen- 
ta-cuatro, Yeinte-dos," and the like, mur- 
mured- in the slow drawling fashion of the 
island, are a most effectual lullaby. 

We did move on again at last, and reach- 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 81 

ed La Coiuma about 4, a. m. There I found 

the calesero of my friend waiting for 

me with a volante, at a large, rambling, 
nondescript establishment, which appears as 
a village on the maps. A jaunty grey- 
headed old Creole with small, twinkling, dis- 
agreeable eyes came up to me here, flour- 
ishing a gold-headed cane of that flexible 
animal fibre so much prized in Cuba, and 

assuring me that Don was his bosom 

friend, very obligingly offered to take a 
seat with me as far as our roads should lie 
together. I had no objection to make, and 
after taking some excessively bad coffee, 
we set off, in company with several meek- 
looking persons, apparently armed to the 
teeth. The road was wonderful ! Now up, 
now down, now plunging up to the horse's 
girths in a small river, now running tilted 
at an angle of 45 degrees along a sand- 
bank, and always at full speed. If the led 
horse lagged, the calesero hauled him along 
like a pig ; if the saddle-horse flinched, the 
calesero boxed his ears. Biding like a cen- 
taur, he flung horses and volante down gul- 



82 GAN-EDEN. 

lies, and jerked them up hills with a seem- 
ing recklessness, which at first made me 
uneasy. But as my companion seemed to 
think it all right, I tried to fall into the 
same state of mind, and entered into con- 
versation with him. 

The road for the whole way ran through 
a savanna, a sort of tropical Cape Cod, with 
palm-trees instead of stunted oaks, and tall 
pine-trees springing out of the weedy 
ground. My companion expatiated on the 
waste of these lands, the uselessness of the 
pine-trees, (that might be so profitable,) and 
the miserable government to which these 
things, and all the other short-comings of 
Cuba were to be attributed. He was evi- 
dently a male content of the first water, but 
he looked for deliverance only to foreign 
arms, and inquired anxiously into the 
chances of war between the United States 
and Spain. This unmanly tone thorough- 
ly disgusted me, and I thought of astonish- 
ing him with Sir William Jones's Ode, just 
as we used to declaim it at Cambridge, but 
contented myself with sundry suggestions 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 83 

as to the importance of preparing the island 
to hold her own, before inviting strangers 
to set her free. I did not, however, say 
what I could not but think, that these vast 
unoccupied tobacco-lands of the Vuelta 
Abajo would certainly tempt hither swarms 
of settlers from Virginia and Kentucky, 
whose presence and enterprise would soon 
awaken in the Creole mind longing memo- 
ries of the " good old royal days." When 
my companion became confidential, and 
began to talk of his own affairs, his remarks 
were rather shocking. My Mediterranean 
experience had made me tolerably familiar 
with the singular skill in blasphemy of the 
Southern nations, but I was hardly prepar- 
ed to hear from living lips, an improvement 
upon Dante's most audacious imagination. 
"My w T ife died last year," said my com- 
panion, " my sister died six months ago, my 
wife's mother and my daughter have just 
died ; now I should like to see what God 
up yonder can do next ! I defy him, and 
he may come on if he dares !" 

Three hours brought us to an Almacen, 



84 GAN-EDEN. 

or " country-store/' where this pious and 
patriotic gentleman alighted. During the 
journey, he had taken occasion to offer me 
his cane, a blow of which, he said, would 
inflict a wound like a sword-cut, and his 
watch; now, on parting, he assured me 
that I was the proprietor of his house and 
estate, and begged me soon to come and 
take possession of them. 

In a few minutes, my volante, as its 
name imports, was "flying" through the 
rustic gateway, guarded by a white headed 
old African, naked as a native on the Coast 
of Congo, into the extensive pasture-lands 
of Don 's plantation. Then past palm- 
trees and mango thickets, giant ceybas 
and gnarled parasites, by grazing herds of 
oxen and scattered mules, over fields that 
glowed with flowers of every hue, we dash- 
ed on up to the low, broad stone house of 
one story, with steep red-tiled roof, and 
dark green verandahs. 

Great dogs rushed out with most ambigu- 
ous barking, to welcome me, and, presently, 
with lounging graceful step, my friend 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 85 

emerged, and I was instantly at home in 
this strange world. 

I told that his bosom friend had 

favored me with his society, and described 
the individual as accurately as possible. 
" Friend ! " cried laughing. " The ras- 
cal is one of the most respectable men, and 
greatest scamps in this scampish district. 
He insulted one of my men last week, and 
has cheated me as often as he possibly 
could ! Moreover he carried you half a 
mile out of your way ! " 



CHAPTER VIII. 

" A pleasing land of clrowsyhead it was." 



Thomson. 



"Non unus mentes agitat furor/' all 
men are not mad in the same way, says 
Juvenal, speaking of traffickers by sea. 
Perhaps like Ulysses and myself, Juvenal 
was "semper nauseator," in which case, 
hawking wares over the water might rea- 
sonably have appeared to him quite lunat- 
ical ; and I am sure that if the coin of the 
realm seemed to him an insufficient induce- 
ment to a Levant voyage, it never would 
have satisfied him as the plea of a man 
who should devote himself to a life on a 
sugar-estate in the Western Ynelta Abajo. 
As the only large sugar-planter in a popu- 
lous district, my friend enjoys a ready 

sale of his products on the spot, and as he 
does not export, is not obliged to adopt the 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 87 

costly French machinery in use on the 
northern coast. But the same causes 
which make his position peculiarly profit- 
able, deprive him of society. He lives in 
a practical exile, relieved by occasional 
trips to the States. Once he said to me, 
"Nothing pleasant ever chances here, and 
the best news I can have in the morning is 
no news." Such persons as my friend and 
his family, it is true, can never be without 
the best company in the world, in their 
own thoughts and feelings. But the best 
of us need at least occasional intercourse 
with our fellows. And this protracted se- 
clusion from the busy world must wear 
upon the most genial spirits. 

Yet, to the casual guest, how delicious is 
the careless monotony of such a seques- 
tered existence ! The climate of this re- 
gion is far finer than that of Havana. In- 
valids come to the Vuelta Abajo from 
other parts of the island, and the diseases 
which ravage the northern coast, rarely 
wander here. 

Nor are the heavens more bland than 



88 GAN-EDEN. 

the temper of my Southern home. No- 
body is in anybody's else way. We live 
like the Thelemites of Rabelais. All our 
moments are employed "selon notre vou- 
loir et franc arbitre. Notre regie n'est que 
cette clause, Fais ce que voudras!" The 
early morning here is truly divine, having 
gold in its hands, as the Germans say, and 
things better than gold, beauty glittering 
dewy-bright on every leaf and blade of all 
this leafy world, and softest breezes breath- 
ing health ! When you weary of lounging 
in the broad piazza, to sketch the graceful 
palm-trees that surround the house, or the 
long-eared, browsing mules, you may stroll 
out across the flowery fields, to yonder vast, 
low sugar-house. You have been watching 
the soft wreaths of smoke curl lazily about 
its lofty chimney, the only moving things 
in all the sleeping landscape, for half an 
hour, while your hand has been dallying 
dreamily with your idle pencil. The great, 
red-tiled shed of the mill is full to the top 
of the cut and bundled canes, and the fat 
old Spanish sugar-master (who eats irve 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 89 

meals a day, and dreams every night he is 
dying of hunger,) is nearly beside himself 
with fear, lest his enemy the mayoral 
should have succeeded this time in hurting 
him with his employer, by giving him more 
juice than he can work up in his allotted 
half of the week. So all the departments 
are in full activity. Wild-looking, half-na- 
ked hordes of negroes, many of them roaring 
out jokes to each other in savage dialects 
of the African coast, tramp up and down 
the platform of the mill, thrusting armfuls 
of the canes between the ponderous rollers 
of the crushing machine ; and there is no 
pause in the flowing of the milky stream of 
cane-juice, which, plunging in a small cata- 
ract from beneath the rollers, runs swiftly 
through canals of cloven palm-trunks to the 
vats of the neighboring purging house. 
There is the heart of this small kingdom. 
Beneath, huge furnaces glow with the 
fiercely burning fuel of the dried canestalks. 
Above, the juice, transferred from boiler to 
boiler, endures all manner of transforma- 
tions, simmering here, foaming there, here 



90 GAN-EDEN. 

moocly and sluggish, a brown and turbid 
pool, there tossing and bubbling, an un- 
easy sea of liquid gold, sending up its 
wholesome vapors in dense white wreaths ; 
now beaten into a perfect syllabub by stal- 
wart negroes, with long paddles made of 
aloes-w T ood, and anon ladled out, in like 
manner, into a trench with lofty sides, 
wherein it is stirred, and flung aloft in 
beautiful showers tinted with the softest 
browns, crystallizing slowly as it falls and 
cools. Sugar is in the air, the ground is yel- 
low with sugar, the walls glitter with small 
crystals of sugar, the dogs lap up the sugar 
from the shallow pans, the little naked 
negroes tumbling about the door-ways, are 
crusted over with sugar; you have found 
life's clumsy realization of childhood's sump- 
tuous dreams. Thus the world mimics 
Snowdrop's forest home. 

But the sun rides high, and we draw 
into the broad piazza our deep, backward 
sloping Spanish chairs, chairs into which a 
tired man sinks as easily as a sinner into 
sin. Far as the eye can reach, we see 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 91 

nothing but June ; June flowering over all 
the fields, June in the deep blue of the 
cloudless skies. The great, low red roofs 
of the distant sugar-houses glow in the 
warm sunlight. The gentle breeze which 
stirs the air about us here, is just strong 
enough to awaken the crisp rustle of the 
drooping palm-leaves, and does not seem to 
shake the heavy foliage of yonder magnifi- 
cent ceybas. Just opposite, rises a huge 
forest trunk completely mastered and ap- 
propriated by the deadly parasite, the 
jaquey-macho, whose closely set, shining 
dark- green leaves, with their irregular out- 
line, look as if they were embroidered up- 
on the soft sky. Great crows fly chatter- 
ing about the broad savanna, the bright 
hues of parrots and paroquets glance in the 
light, and countless pine-linnets wheel about 
the trees, keeping up a continual delicate 
singing. The hills to the north have put 
on their noonday purple ; and to the south, 
the bright yellow-green of the canefields 
makes merry the horizon. Through the 
amber-colored heaps of bagasso, the crushed 



02 GAN-EDEN. 

canes drying in the sun, a swart African 
woman makes her way, balancing a water 
jar upon her head. The tinkling of the 
mule-bells grows fainter and fainter, as the 
long train of laden mules winds slowly on- 
ward into the wood beyond those swaying 
palm-trees. 

Trouble not your brain with studious 
plans, for this conspiracy of idleness will 
surely defeat them all ! Your indolence is 
indeed an indolence of incessant thoughts, 
but of thoughts that glide from the grasp 
of your will. They flow through your 
mind like the sap of life through every 
vein of this wonderful vegetable world 
around you. You are roused at last, only 
by the gathering sadness which this still 
stream has borne into your soul. 

• As day after day rolls on, the isolation 
and the quiet of this life begin to close 
around you. The Thebaid and the Cloister 
become intelligible. Sometimes you are 
conscious of a feeling, such as may have 
dimly glowed in the mind of an antedilu- 
vian toad, when the cavity of his refuge 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 93 

began to narrow, and the cell to form, in 
which, for a thousand years, he was to be 
shut out from the sedges and the green 
ponds. 

Then you are grateful for the stirring 
talk of " states and wars," and the game 
thereto congenial, of time-honored English 
whist, whereby your kind friend draws you 
back to modern and expansive life. 

You resolve to botanize, and find that 
you have spent the morning at the foot of 
a colossal ceyba, niched between two of the 
broad buttresses that spring from its mas- 
sive trunk, and watching th? sports of the 
negro children in the field, or the diversi- 
fied forms of viciousness displayed by the 
mules, grandiloquent Pindar's " children of 
the tempest-footed steeds," in their war of 
independence with the sullen arriero their 
tyrant. 

In the afternoon rides with you to 

the tobacco-farm, beautiful with the intense 
verdure of the broad-leaved plants, or down 
through the guava groves to give the re- 
luctant bloodhounds a swim in the little 



94 GAN-EDEN. 

Laguna de San Matteo, or over to the 
neighboring town, the capital of cock- 
fights, balls, and lawsuits, for all the coun- 
try round. It is a queer, dirty town, the 
chef -lieu of a department, containing 1,000 
inhabitants, and maintaining 30 shops, 
where, by a simple process of alchemy, the 
tobacco of the Vuelta Abajo is converted 
into building materials for substantial cas- 
tles in Spain. In this town a Lieutenant- 
Governor holds his court ; there many law- 
yers congregate, and in the barracks a 
thousand troops are stationed. If we go 
there by day, we see only a few dark eyes 
and dirty faces staring at our volante, 
through the iron bars of the low houses, 
unless it be a festival, when the cockpit is 
filled with a crowd which, like all village 
crowds, comes one knows not whence, 
and disappears when the show is over, as 
mysteriously. At night, the little town 
mocks in its provincial way, the greater 
capital. The curtains drawn aside from 
the huge windows, reveal handsome rooms 
and menageries of fair ladies behind the 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 95 

iron bars. Perhaps we may make a call 
upon some village family. Close shaven, 
slender, sallow-faced gentlemen receive us 
with elaborate courtesy ; we take our seats 
in immense arm-chairs, and commence a 
vapid conversation, which becomes still 
more vapid when the ladies appear. They 
saunter into the room, very lightly dressed, 
and apparently quite overloaded and op- 
pressed by the scanty dress they wear, sa- 
lute us feebly, drop into the opposite arm- 
chairs, and begin to fan themselves very 
languidly. The few and foolish things they 
say are uttered in a very nasal voice, 
which sadly vulgarizes the sonorous Spanish 
tongue. The poor creatures look as if life 
were one weary dawdle, and so I suppose it 
is to them. 

No humane person can long endure the 
sight of suffering which he cannot relieve, 
so we take our departure,, are faintly bid- 
den " go in a good hour," and drive up to 
the Plaza, an irregular piece of ground, 
decorated with a preposterous little church, 
a parti-colored Governor's House, and sun- 



96 GAN-EDEN. 

dry huts, hovels, and whitewashed barracks. 
But the mingling lights of the moon and 
of torches, make the forlorn little Plaza 
picturesque, and it is not without pleasure 
that we listen to the military band playing 
"indifferent well." When we drive home 
through the moonlit gullies, and across the 
wild savanna, stories of the brigand age 
that used to be fit well the scene. 

In this life we lead, or which, more prop- 
erly speaking, leads us, every change in 
the aspect of nature is an event. The 
changes of the skies, so interesting every- 
where, become doubly fascinating here. 
The Cuban skies are, I think, the most 
beautiful I have ever seen. They combine 
the various and splendid brilliancy of our 
own skies with the soft luminousness of the 
European. The sunsets are startling. Twi- 
light belongs to the lands of the imagina- 
tion. Here we pass in a moment from 
darkness to day, and from the sunshine 
into starlight, just as one moment's breath- 
less silence takes you from the glowing 
magnificence of the Bay of Naples, into the 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 97 

moonlight-blue of the Grotto of Capri. 
There is no 

" Gathering up the golden reins. 
And pacing leisurely down amber plains ; " 

only one broad sweeping gush of western 
light, and then the purple drops suddenly- 
over all, and the innumerable stars are 
glittering larger and brighter than ours. 

Sometimes the evening is made more 
beautiful by a fire in the savanna, a sight 
not uncommon in this region, and unpleas- 
ant to the dwellers in the land, only when 
it threatens a canefield in its course. One 
evening, while watching the shadows of the 
trees, and tree-like vines in the lake, and 
the play of the graceful dogs on the shore, 
I heard a rushing sound like the beating of 
many wings upon the air, and looking in 
the direction whence it came, saw clouds of 
light blue smoke rolling slowly up against 
the sky. In a few moments the southern 
sky was stained all over in black and gold, 
with the thick smoke and leaping flames. 
We hurried to the house, and turning on 
9 



98 GAN-EDEN. 

the hill, saw a broad sheet of waving flame 
running all along the southern border of 
the lake and reflected in the still water. 
More and more intense grew the conflagra- 
tion, till it reddened the dark-purple sky, 
and put out the stars above its path with 
its fiery glow. The graceful or fantastic 
shapes of the trees stood out finely from 
this wild background, and from time to 
time a fresh gleam of flame, seen through 
the interstices of the thick low chapparal, 
would flash like the heart of a carbuncle. 

The most gorgeous atmospheric pageant 
of the tropics, the thundershower, can only 
be seen in perfection during the summer 
months. Yet we had one shower which, 
though not of the first water, was very fine 
in the eyes of an inexperienced Northerner. 
I had never seen clouds so dense and black 
as were gathered in the south, while in the 
west the blue sky still glittered with the 
sun. The rain began with a few drops, 
large as bullets, falling slowly, then came 
the whole mass of water, beating down 
every thing, and forming in a few moments, 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 99 

under my windows, a depression in the 
earth two or three inches deep. With the 
rain came tremendous peals of thunder, 
scaring the fierce hounds, and lightning 
brighter than molten iron. The air was 
full of electricity. I took up a pair of 
scissors, and received a smart shock. With 
the lull in the rain, there appeared from 
north to south, across the eastern sky, a 
magnificent rainbow, the arch complete, as 
if seen over the ocean, only the southern 
end dipped through the glistening foliage of 
a superb ceyba, before it disappeared in the 
beryl-bright waves of the canefields. And 
over all the landscape such a flood of light ! 
the mellow light of October, bathing every 
leaf and blade of refreshed and sparkling 
nature. Then shifting through a myriad 
changes of hue and form, the cloud-racks 
broke up, and slowly wandered off along 
the burnished sky. The distant mountains 
glowed amethystine, like the Apennines at 
sunset. 



CHAPTER IX. 



Adieu! doux et brilliant rivage, 

Ou 1' (Stranger reste comme enchaine\ 

Bekanger. 



" See Naples and then die," says the prov- 
erb, with a fine extravagance. One soon 
comprehends the spirit of the speech, when 
the genius of the place has fairly possessed 
his senses and his soul. It is not on re- 
cord, to be sure, that anybody ever really 
overturned his cup of life, simply because 
Naples had filled it to the brim. Men and 
women have sung in serious earnest the 
song of Thekla, but not for that. But 
Naples so satisfies the body and the brain 
with a glowing sensuous beauty immanent 
in the air, the skies, the landscape, and the 
sea, that one finds the proverb rising to his 
lips, laughs at the ciceroni, is glad of no 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 101 

guidebook, cares not to see a single sight, 
and, for long days, dreams wide awake in 
the balcony of his hotel, finding the true 
Pompeii and Herculaneum in the visions 
which the blue smoke-wreath of far Vesu- 
vius is hourly weaving, the Roman with his 
fierce luxury, the Greek with his voluptu- 
ous grace, in Capri's stately cloud, and soft 
Sorrento's sunlit height. 

The life of this tropic " Castle of Indo- 
lence," is more dreamy than the dream of 
Naples. Thoughts vanish like vapors in 
this warm sunlight, and the mind is cloud- 
less as the skies. Hayti and Jamaica loomed 
large upon the horizon of my purpose when 
I wandered here, but they have gone like a 
vision of sails. 

Day after day has glided noiselessly by. 
" Why should I seek to gather up in scat- 
tered fragments here and there, the Cuba 
whose very essence is held here in a golden 
cup to my lips?" Thus I dreamt and mused, 
till the sound of the Easter bells rang in 
our ears, and roused us to seek the city. 
For this year the holy Easter time was to 
9*' 



102 GAN-EDEN. 

be pompously celebrated. The fighting 
bulls of Spain were to assert their triumph 
over the pacific bull of Pope Pius V. by a 
magnificent contest on Easter Sunday in 
the new Plaza de Toros at Havana. A 
quadrille of bull-fighters had just arrived, 
headed by one Juan Pastor of Seville, 
whose name has been consigned to fame 
by Mr. Waliis, in his pleasant book about 
Spain. 

Every thing was to be arranged in the 
true Castilian style, for the authorities hope 
to galvanize Cuba into loyalty by the good 
old Spanish excitement. So we set out one 
fine morning after a heavy thundershower 
which had converted the shallow trench, 
or deep rut, called a road, into a lively 
watercourse. 

A great part of this district is accessible 
only on horseback. The mule driver with 
his long string of beasts tied together, and 
depending each upon the strength of his 
predecessor's tail, is the great carrier. The 
mail is taken on horseback from the con- 
siderable town of Pinar del Rio to Ha- 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 103 

vana, though there is a railway and steam- 
boat communication nearly all the way ! 
This, however, is perhaps to give Her Ma- 
jesty's courier time to read at his leisure 
all the contents of Her Majesty's mails. 

The Baths of San Diego are the chief 
Spa, the Saratoga of Cuba, The waters 
are highly medicinal, and the river San 
Diego, besides "tasting of warm flatirons," 
exhibits a phenomenon rarely witnessed in 
nature, though familiar enough in the 
world of politics and human feeling, by 
running hot, cold, and lukewarm, within 
a very short career. Numbers of people 
throng to these baths every year, and 
though the cabins are naturally enough as 
detestable as the accommodations at more 
renowned resorts of invalided fashion, one 
would expect to find the road thither at 
least passable. But it is atrociously bad ; 
as much more appalling than a char-a-banc 
pass in Switzerland, as earth is more yield- 
ing than rock, and a smother in unfathom- 
able mud more awful than a cleanly tum- 
ble down a grand ravine into a clear, 
sparkling mountain stream. 



104 GAN-EDEN. 

We reached the Almacen de la Columa 
about ten o'clock, and I had leisure to sur- 
vey the place. These Spanish-American 
variety-store-warehouse-hotels, have pecu- 
liar features of their own. Instead of the 
dreary counter, and the shelves with their 
rows of sinister-looking decanters and demi- 
johns, we had here a small apartment, very 
like a booth at a fair, arched over with a 
painted arch, decorated with the Spanish 
colors, and bearing the attractive inscription 
"Las Delicias de la Columa;" the fitness of 
the title being apparent on a glance at the 
shelves of sweetmeats, cigars, sardines, cor- 
dials, and aguardiente. The dispenser of 
these delights was an olive-complexioned 
boy of fifteen, with laughing black eyes, 
like those of Murillo's musical ragamuffins 
at Dulwich. His deference to his seniors 
was quite astonishing, to one accustomed to 
the independent and uncompromising style 
of "Young America" in such positions. 

Within the spacious warehouse were to 
be found all manner of things, from codfish 
to preserved figs, coarse cloth for the slaves, 
and coarse jewelry for the Yegueras. 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 105 

Above the storehouse and along the cor- 
ridors, were the rooms of the " hotel," occu- 
pied just then by the families of the small 
planters in the neighborhood, who had come 
for the " sea bathing," that is, for the privi- 
lege of spending a couple of hours a day, 
paddling about in three feet or so of salt 
mud and water, within a space of twenty 
feet by fifteen, under a heavy covering of 
palm thatch. 

The permanent population of "La Co- 
luma," consists of three men and a boy, five 
cats, eleven dogs, and a game-cock, the latter 
creature,during his " piping times of peace," 
being tied by the leg to a huge hidebound 
chair in the storehouse. We asked the head 
of the house how many guests were staying 
with him. " Fifteen women" he replied, " be- 
sides some men and children, perhaps forty in 
all." The next " Woman's Rights Conven- 
tion," ought to be held in La Columa, for it 
is plain that the male population of that 
place is better prepared for an unconditional 
surrender of the antiquated privileges of 
man, than any other beyond the borders of 



106 GAN-EDEN. 

California or Australia. We spent four or 
fiYe hours at the Almacen, waiting, as usual, 
for the steamer, during which time the 
fifteen females, so precious in the eyes of 
their host, came out into their saloon, this 
same saloon serving at the same time as a 
coach-house for a dusty volante, and as a 
private dining-room for a family party, while 
its position on one side of the house, and 
its mural arrangements, — there being no 
doors, — enabled the occupants to observe 
the arrivals and departures, and to enliven 
their retirement with the spectacle of diver- 
sified dog-fights. The women were a yel- 
low, sickly-looking set of creatures, dressed 
in very bright colors. Their manners and 
customs were peculiarly naive and uncon- 
strained. I was particularly attracted by 
one old lady of sixty, whose parchment face 
reminded me of Heine's dame in the Harz 
mountains, whose countenance resembled a 
palimpsest in which a monkish homily had 
been written over a Greek love story. Her 
dress still wore a hue of youthful folly. She 
was arrayed in scarlet and white muslin, 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 107 

orange colored stockings, a blue silk shawl 
gorgeously embroidered with large dahlias 
and roses in green and yellow silk ; a bunch 
of artificial flowers adorned her hair, and 
huge gold ear-rings glittered in her ears. 
Thus wonderful in her appearance, she 
glided gracefully into the storehouse, pur- 
chased a long Jenny Lind cigar, asked the 
favor of a light from a Montero gentleman 
in a striped blue shirt, with a sword at his 
side, and silver spurs on his stockingless feet ; 
and then returning to the "saloon," while 
the soft smoke curled about her head, took 
up a broom and proceeded to sweep away 
the remnants of the morning's meal. The 
family party dined in private, shortly after. 
They courteously invited every one who 
passed by to take a seat at the table, but as 
four mules were loading at the time, one of 
whom liked to back viciously into the saloon 
every time his master came near him, we 
declined their invitation, hoping for a decent 
dinner on board the boat. But the boat 
did not come, so that we were forced to 
dine at the table d'hote of the Almacen in 



108 GAN-EDEN. 

company with the people of the house, some 
laborers, the crew of a lighter, and a dra- 
goon partially intoxicated. And I must say 
to the honor of these good souls, that their 
manners, though by no means elegant, were 
vastly more decent, unselfish, and becoming, 
than have been displayed by much better 
dressed companies at railway stations and 
on board of steamers at home. Even the 
drunken dragoon only evinced his state by 
bad behavior towards the dogs, which kept 
running under the table. He kicked at 
them, traitorously seduced them to approach 
him, and then cuffed them dreadfully, and 
when they " fought shy " of him, earnestly 
adjured " Maria santissima, purissima," to 
interest herself for their eternal perdition. 
This dragoon was a short red-faced, white- 
haired, jaunty fellow, very like an Irishman 
in form and features. This is by no means 
an uncommon thing here among the Span- 
iards of the lower orders. One's romantic 
notions of the haughty, sad-eyed Castilian 
face are sadly shocked in Cuba. Once I 
saw a white-robed Dominican covered like 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 109 

Sancho, " four fingers thick with good Chris- 
tian fat," who might have been the Man- 
chegan squire masquerading ; and there is a 
berlin-driver in Havana who perfectly re- 
produces Lazarillo de Tormes : but, generally 
speaking, the Spanish type has deteriorated 
and lost character in Cuba. On the way 
up in the boat, which came at last, long 
after its time, I had a conversation with a 
civil engineer, who told me he had just been 
selling a hacienda of land, in the western 
department of the Vuelta Abajo, wliich had 
brought on an average nine hundred dollars 
the Caballeria of about thirty- three acres. 
This was regarded as an extraordinary price, 
though the hacienda comprised some of the 
best tobacco lands under cultivation in Cuba, 
one small vega or farm on the estate, tilled 
by one man alone, without slaves, having 
netted one thousand dollars to its tenant 
during the past year. This region is the 
promised land of the small planters of Ken- 
tucky and Virginia. 

We reached Havana on Good Friday. 
That day there was to have been a great 
10 



110 GAN-EDEN. 

and thoroughly Spanish show of the pro- 
cession of the Sacred Interment, and the 
subsequent waitings in the churches, a sort 
of etude a deux crayons, a caricature in black 
and yellow-white, of the magnificent cere- 
monies of Seville — was to have been, but was 
not, for the rain fell in torrents from ^.Ye in 
the afternoon till ten at night. Nothing 
was even attempted, which was very wise, 
for excepting a pic-nic in May, nothing is so 
pitiable as a damp procession. The Cafe- 
men who count largely upon the gains of 
Good Friday, were disappointed, the priests 
were disappointed, the strangers, everybody 
but the young citizens who have to do es- 
cort duty to their female relations, and find 
them in countless ice-creams all along the 
route of the parade. On Saturday morning 
the sun rose clear, and, by daybreak, the 
Paseo, without the walls, was crowded with 
carts and wheeled vehicles of every kind, 
jostling and jolting together for the prece- 
dence. At ten o'clock, the circulation within 
the walls, suspended during Good Friday, 
begins again, and the cartmen regard it as 



PICTURES OF CUBA. Ill 

an omen of good luck for the whole year, 
to be first on the wharves. At ten the can- 
non boomed, the bells began to ring, and 
the rattle of innumerable wheels, the bray- 
ing of donkeys, the yells and cries of men, 
made the fair Easter-day hideous. They 
are worse here, particularly in the matter 
of bells, than in Italy. A convent hard by 
my hotel, rang out a lively jig in honor of 
the holy clay, during four long hours. It is 
said that the priests find it a good thing to 
dispose of their negro penitents by setting 
them to ring the bells, and the frequency 
with which the genuine "break-down," in 
all its modifications, assails the ear, inclines 
one to accept the story. 

On Sunday afternoon, the first bull-fight 
in the new Plaza was to have come off; but 
the rain began again, at four o'clock. A 
Creole marquis, enriched by the ingenious 
appropriation of a number of negroes, hired 
out to him by the mixed commission of 
England and Spain, intended to have opened 
the show in the state affected on such occa- 
sions by the nobles of Old Spain, in a gilded 



112 GAN-EDEN. 

coach, with outriders and banners and what 
not. The rain, which spoiled his sport, af- 
forded an impoverished Spanish marquis of 
my acquaintance, who condescends to a 
berth in the custom-house, an opportunity 
of dilating upon the magnificence of the 
outfit with which he himself would have 
adorned the show, had the weather per- 
mitted. The grand Catalan ball also had 
to be postponed, as the ballroom was knee- 
deep in water. And the only spectacle of 
Easter Sunday was the grand mass at the 
Cathedral in the morning, when the Te 
Deurn was sung in honor of the queen's 
escape from the knife of the crazy priest 
Martino, a year ago. This was really a bril- 
liant affair. The Cathedral itself is very 
like San Ignazio at Eome, without the gild- 
ing, the lapis lazuli, and the marbles — a 
large, tawdry, Komanesque church of the 
seventeenth century, with stuccoed pillars, 
a bright blue organ, quantities of brass or- 
naments, wax divinities, artificial flowers, 
and poor pictures. The interest of the 
building centres about the tomb of Colum- 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 113 

bus, a mural monument of white marble, 
with an imaginary bas-relief portrait, and a 
paltry inscription. Yet the style of the 
choir, with its lofty altar of porphyry and 
its dark mahogany misereres and desks, lends 
a pleasant Italian character to this last rest- 
ing-place of the great Genoese, who, for 
weary years, bore the New World about in 
his throbbing brain, praying the nations of 
the earth to take the magnificent gift at his 
hands. On Easter Sunday the Cathedral 
appeared to the best advantage. The high 
altar glowed with candles, little and large. 
The great aisle of the nave was lined on 
each side with mahogany benches, covered 
with scarlet velvet, the floor between being 
appropriated to ladies. Before nine o'clock, 
flights of fair Cubans in their graceful cos- 
tume had occupied nearly all this space, 
kneeling on praying-carpets spread for them 
by little negro pages, whose gay liveries, 
chiefly scarlet, or blue and white, contrasted 
finely with their dark faces. I was aston- 
ished to see how few of the ladies wore the 
old " regulation black," of the church. Silks 
10* 



114 GAN-EDEN. 

of every color rustled and glistened in the 
fine sunlight. The effect was not so rich as 
that produced by the dark masses of figures 
at an Italian high mass ; but the flowing 
mantillas and veils were there, and remem- 
bering how near to Cuba may be the inva- 
sion of the bonnets, I was grateful for what 
yet remained of the picturesque. Officers 
in various uniforms, ecclesiastics in capes 
and cassocks of yellow and purple and scar- 
let and black and green, kept coming in, 
and the mahogany benches soon began to 
be filled ; while an increasing crowd of mu- 
lattoes and quadroons and negroes, of dra- 
goons in lemon-colored jackets, and foot-sol- 
diers in full dress of blue and red, looking 
like awkward National Guards, and Creoles 
in black, and foreigners in white, swarmed 
in the side aisles. The Plaza outside was 
full of volantes, and the fine horses reared, 
and plunged, and backed, greatly to the de- 
light of the vociferating caleseros. 

Soon, a brilliant staff of officers, glittering 
with orders, announced the Captain-Gene- 
ral 5 and then, accompanied by a couple of 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 115 

• 

aids-de-camp in scarlet uniforms, Canedo 
himself, stiff with gold lace, blazing with 
plaques and stars, and cut in two diagonally 
by a huge crimson ribbon, inarched up the 
broad aisle among the kneeling ladies, with 
the stately step of a pluralist rector. As I 
stood in the Cathedral, and saw this repre- 
sentative of the ancient crown of Spain 
advance, in all the paraphernalia of his 
rank, and looked around me on the strange 
throng of decorated officers, and silken ec- 
clesiastics, and collegians in black doublets 
and square ruffs, recalling the days of Eu- 
bens and Vandyck and Velasquez, I seemed 
to be gazing on a "dissolving view," the 
next mutation of which would present to 
the eye, "lean and hungry" yankees in 
black satin waistcoats ; for the Captain-Gen- 
eral and the Bishop, the " Governor of the 
State," and the "reverend clergy," and for 
a "grand mass in honor of the queen," a 
Fourth of July oration in the Tacon theatre. 
These visions were soon scared away by 
the uproar of the service. The music was 
Moorish in the matter of clangor and rack- 



116 GAN-EDEN. 

et; and the bell-ringing at the altar, now 
at brief intervals, with the impetuous sud- 
denness of a steamboat bell signaling " stop 
her " and " ease her," now prolonged and 
stunning, like a dinner-bell, was more intol- 
erable than I have ever heard elsewhere. 
There was a great deal of posturing, as 
usual, by men in cloth of gold and cloth of 
silver, but the service, though not less Bud- 
dhistical, was less brilliant than in even the 
smaller Italian cities. 

I happened to be very near four censer- 
men, two in red velvet dressing-gowns, and 
two in red damask. They had the potato- 
like faces of the most forlorn sons of Con- 
naught; the soiled collars of their seedy 
black coats peeped over the splendors of 
their robes; the huge silver urns hung 
dejectedly, for the day was hot, and the 
men were as weary as jaded hacks around 
a railroad station. These wretched men 
haunted me till I left the church. What 
possible purpose of religion could be an- 
swered by the incense of such miserable 
mortals, who seemed to loathe their heavy 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 117 

silver censers as the tired stoker loathes his 
coal-hod ? 

After the grand mass we had a parade. 
The Captain-General reviewed about two 
thousand men, infantry and artillery. The 
men are very sensibly dressed in white linen 
uniforms, and present a respectable appear- 
ance. They were then armed with heavy 
Spanish muskets, for which I understand 
Minie rifles have since been substituted. 
How much of the old stuff that made up 
the armies of Charles V. and Philip II., when 
the infantry of Spain were the best of Eu- 
rope, and the Ugotes of Alva gave a fitting 
name to all tyrants in religion, is still to be 
found under the turreted flag, is a question 
I will not undertake to settle. One thing 
at least is certain. In those old times the 
Spanish soldier was a gentleman, and well- 
born men passed their lives in the ranks. 
Now the Spanish soldier is treated like a 
dog. I saw men kicked and cuffed by the 
officers on parade. Common soldiers every- 
where, are not apt to be the elite of man- 
kind, says Leigh Hunt, and these troops are 



118 GAN-EDEN. 

no exception to the rule. Mr. Wallis speaks 
in high terms of the spirit and martial bear- 
ing of the Spanish troops in Cadiz and the 
neighborhood, but the troops at Havana are 
certainly not distinguished in that way. 
Perhaps the climate affects them, but they 
look dejected and dull. 

Easter-Tuesday, closing the Easter festi- 
vals, sent back many unlucky people to 
their business, who had come up to the city 
for amusements with which the " norther " 
had sadly interfered. In different rural dis- 
tricts the season passed off brilliantly. At 
San Antonio and Guanajay, for instance, two 
young ladies being severally chosen queens 
of the yellow and the crimson bands, ap- 
pointed their courts, created nobles, and, of 
course, declared war against each other. 
The cockpit was their Flanders, and the 
conflict was waged by those gladiatorial 
birds, whose courage makes them the vic- 
tims of man's ferocious tastes. The news- 
papers of Havana for a fortnight had been 
full of pompous proclamations from these 
rival queens, records of levees, and loyal 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 119 

poetry quite as poor as the effusions of more 
conspicuous laureates. On Sunday, accounts 
of the successive cockfights were transmit- 
ted to Havana. This nonsense, like the fol- 
lies of the Carnival at Rome, is sedulously 
encouraged by the government. 

The disappointments of Easter week fell 
heavily on the Catalans, whose Orphan So- 
ciety is aided by the profits of annual balls 
at Easter. These balls are usually given in 
the Opera House, but this year the proprie- 
tor of that building, (a notorious ex-pirate, 
to whom Tacon granted great privileges, 
including the monopoly of the fish-market,) 
was so unreasonable, that the Catalans got 
permission to erect a great shanty in the 
Campo Marte or parade ground. The de- 
parture of the country people was a sad 
blow to the Catalans, and the ex-pirate prob- 
ably rubbed his hands with delight at every 
shower. But when at last they gave their 
ball, the attendance was good, and the scene 
very lively. There were masks of all sorts, 
negroes, animals, Chinamen, Indians, slim 
little brown Highlanders in white kilts, Cos- 



120 GAN-EDEN. 

sacks in patent leather pumps, an English 
jockey in a red cotton frock coat and yellow 
Spanish boots, with other such vraisemblcmi 
characters as one usually sees at such places. 
But there were also some genuine novelties, 
Andalusians in the maja, Biscayans, Astu- 
rians, Gallicians, in their national costumes. 
Coniparsas, or bands of young men, performed 
on a great platform, different national 
dances. And yet the show was the very 
faintest shadow of that enthralling and 
astounding Walpurgis-night, the masked 
ball of the French Opera. The Spaniard 
wants the wit and diablerie, the Creole lacks 
the vigor and vivacity of that most naive, 
extraordinary, blase and yet inexhaustible 
youth, the true Parisian. 

The Spaniard would never tolerate those 
jocose and frivolous parodies of the bull- 
fight, which used to win such applause at 
the Hippodrome ; neither would the Parisian 
endure the brutality of the veritable " cor- 
rida de torosV The horror of the bull-fight 
does not consist in the danger to the men. 
As Lord Byron well says, an English box- 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 121 

ing-match ought to be ten times more dis- 
gusting on that score. Neither do I think 
that the sufferings of the bull are such as to 
shock us greatly. The bull is a fierce crea- 
ture. On Dr. Watts's theory he should be 
allowed to "delight" in bellowing and but- 
ting, "for 'tis his nature to ! " Every thing 
conspires to excite him ; and when his blood 
is up, he can hardly be even so conscious of 
the wounds which he receives, as is a man 
or a boy of the blows which he takes in a 
battle of fisticuffs. The true loathsomeness 
of the spectacle (the moral influence of the 
whole practice is, of course, detestable) con- 
sists, I think, in the appearance of the 
wounded horses. I saw but one bull-fight, 
and such was the impression left on my 
mind. Yet that was a i: gentle and joyous 
passage of arms," for only two horses per- 
ished. Three of the bulls indeed played 
the ox, and refused the encounter, justifying 
thus the sneer of that Captain-General who 
refused to establish bull-fights on the plea 
that there were no bulls in Cuba. One of 
these recreants, as soon as the picador rode 
11 



122 GAN-EDEN. 

at him, lance in rest, turned tail and trotted 
off as if before the herdsman. Round and 
round the arena he trotted, looking up pa- 
thetically at the people, till the audience 
clamored for his removal. The beast was 
so astounded and alarmed, that when the 
door was opened he kept running by it, till 
some person wisely thought of backing in 
another bull, at sight of whose familiar tail, 
the bull within made a rush and followed 
his cousin out. A brave black bull who 
fought fiercely, received great applause from 
the amateurs round about me. " Ay ! ay ! " 
cried one, " that is like the little ones (los 
chicos) of Navarre ! " This bull was struck 
by the matador (or killer) very unsteadily, 
so that his first rush upon the extended 
sword did not slay him, and he was dis- 
patched by a second blow. This was en- 
tirely against the rules of the "art,"' and the 
unlucky matador was chased out with hisses 
and cries of " Blockhead ! assassin ! foul fin- 
gers! butcher!" "Ay de mi!" sighed an 
enthusiast near by me, " so. noble a bull so 
basely killed ! " I was reminded of Byron's 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 123 

story about the priest's bull at Cadiz, that 
was cheered for tossing three horses. All 
these fights were criticized in the " Diario 
de la Marina/' as gravely and elaborately as 
the performances at the theatre. But the 
show and the criticism interested only Pen- 
insulars. The Creoles- do not love the sport 
in itself, and they regard its revival as a 
mere farce. 



CHAPTER X. 



"Into the green- reGessed woods." 
Keats. 



The change from the endless levels, pine 
barrens, swamps, and sluggish streams of 
Eastern Carolina and Virginia, to the high- 
lands, clean forests, and quick waters of the 
mountain districts, is not more complete 
than from the rolling savannas, ' sentinel 
palms, and motionless lagunas of the Vuelta 
Ahajo, to the hill roads, dense vegetation, 
and broad, sweeping vistas of the north 
coast. The south is tropical to the spirit, 
the north more superbly tropical to the eye. 
Here is the domain of that gorgeous and 
formidable vegetation which wages such a 
constant war with the works of man, the 
vegetation which has toppled down the 
temples of the Aztec, and hidden the 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 125 

cities of Central America in a green night, 
and built along the Orinoco and the 
Amazon fortresses of barbarism and of ig- 
norance, impregnable alike by commerce 
and by curiosity. The wastes of north- 
ern Cuba are jungles of closely twining 
plants, gay with the myriad hues of strange, 
magnificent flowers, and overtopped by 
gigantic trees, whose trunks are not less 
gay with fantastic embroideries, and from 
whose Briarean arms hang countless veils 
and fringes of creeping plants, the names of 
which cause upon the ear the same indefi- 
nite impression of savage magnificence that 
is made by their blended, indistinguishable 
forms upon the eye. All things, which to 
ns of the temperate zones are creatures of 
boxes and of bales, creations, we might per- 
haps as truly say, of the merchant and the 
grocer, meet us here at every turn, wild and 
bold in the woods, the fan-like cacao-tree, 
the spreading vanilla, the parasite tamarind, 
the gaunt and desolate guava. The cactus 
no longer struggles for existence in the fee- 
ble sunshine of a three pair back window 
11* 



126 GAN-EDEN. 

A with a southern exposure ; but, swollen to 
the size of a scrub-oak, impedes your way 
with its cluli 7 hideous, prickly leaves, and 
flaunts its great flowers in your face. You 
may cool your thirst by day with the sweet, 
clear waters of the cocoa-nut. You may 
cool your heated eyes by night with such 
floods of golden moonlight as would have 
driven Shelley mad. The moon, which gives 
expression to the most tedious landscape, 
and the most unmeaning face, and converts 
the delight of gazing upon beauty into a 
kind of frenzy, the moon makes all men 
Enclymions in Cuba. 

The silence of these tropic forests is tre- 
mendous. Still are they as the seat of 
Saturn. No beast crashes through the 
undergrowth, no bird sings in the branches, 
no wind sighs through the mighty tops. 
The living creatures of that world glance 
noiselessly through the air, or glide stealth- 
ily beneath the heavy sound-deadening 
verdure. Your own voice startles you. 
Sublime at first, this silence soon grows 
insufferably oppressive. You are on the 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 127 

point of giving an impatient shout, when 
your purpose is anticipated by nature with 
a shriek which pierces your very brain, a 
shriek mean and malicious as the cry of an 
imp. Saddening is the absence of song 
birds from the Cuban landscape. With the 
exception of a few visitors from the Florida 
coast, the birds of Cuba are only gaily 
dressed birds of the ball-room. America, in 
general, has been ill-treated in this matter. 
Among the woods of our own New England, 
we may not hold our breath to hear as in 
Surrey or in Switzerland : — 

" The selfsame song that found a path, 
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home, 
She stood in tears among the alien corn ; " 

nor soar with " the scorner of the ground," 
till our own souls become " blithesome and 
cumberless," as that "sightless song;." Yet 
for us the clarion of the wood thrush rings 
nobly sweet through the aisles of the pine 
forest, and the Canadian whistler outpipes 
all Arcady among our stately hills, and the 
bubbling rapture of the bobolink chases 



128 GAN-EDEN. 

awhile the thought of death that haunts our 
fatal shores. Cuba has no such voices. Her 
landscape is worse than soulless. The par- 
rot gives it an uncanny soul, a sprite of evil. 
Is there not at least an elective affinity be- 
tween scandal-mongers and parrots, between 
those shrewish, furbelowed, feathered dowa- 
gers, and their ill-tongued gossips, the 
" Kaffeeschwestern," the unmusical human 
souls that love " the treasons, stratagems, 
and spoils " of social life ? The white par- 
rot in particular, has something positively 
diabolical in the tone of its voice. Had 
Ver-Vert been a white parrot, he had never 
needed a trip to Lyons to corrupt him. 

But if the ear be defrauded of its dues in 
Cuba, the eye luxuriates. The island com- 
prises within its borders the most beauteous 
extremes of hill and plain — plains un- 
broken as prairies, mountains that rival the 
highest peaks of the Appalachians. The 
towns, it is true, are monotonously alike. 
In seeing Havana one has seen the leading 
traits of appearance and of social character 
which distinguish all the lesser cities. There 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 129 

are, however, a few places of some note 
which possess a picturesque individuality. 
Matanzas, the " home of the Muses " in Cuba, 
has its lovely bay, shoaling out so far from 
shore that between the fleet of ships and 
the noble quay the moon at night makes a 
broad lagoon of gold, dotted over with little 
scudding cloud-like boats and launches ; and 
it's long, rolling, flower-studded hill of the 
Cumbre, parting the busy town from the 
happy valley of the Yumuri, a valley bright 
with the contrasting beryls and emeralds of 
the cane fields and the woods, and peaceful 
with the calm presence of colossal ceybas, 
that rise above its green and golden undula- 
tions of foliage, like holy bishops, full of 
power and pastoral love. In its effect upon 
a landscape the ceyba singularly resembles 
that most impressive of trees, the Roman 
pine. 

Ancient Baracoa, the earliest settlement 
of the Spanish, stands like one of the eyry 
cities of the Rhine, a watchtower looking 
to the east. Santiago cle Cuba, scarred by 
earthquakes from which its magnificent 
rocky portals, its pillars of Hercules, were 



130 GAN-EDEN. 

no defence, asserts in its stately position and 
in the French tone of its society, a right to 
particular mention. So, too, I suppose would 
revolutionary Puerto Principe, which had 
the courage to shut up its doors and win- 
dows during the visit of his Excellency the 
Captain-General, giving the lie by the som- 
bre silence of the houses and the compara- 
tive desertion of the streets, to the loyal up- 
holstery of the public buildings and the 
Plaza. Enterprising Trinidad boasts of its 
fine harbor, and its handsome houses, and 
of the princely sugar estates which assure 
its prosperity. Even the little new western 
port of Cabanas lifts up its voice, concerning 
the grandeur of that arm of the sea which 
for seven miles forces its way through bold 
shores luxuriant with a gorgeous vegetation, 
and affords a space wherein, as the geogra- 
phies say, " all the navies of the world might 
ride securely at anchor." The oyster eater 
will find his way to Sagua, and the man 
who " depends on shooting a flamingo," like 
the traveller in Switzerland whose heart is 
set on a chamois, will probably see more of 
the island than he will care to describe. 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 131 

Less than one third of the land m Cuba 
being under cultivation, large regions are as 
little known as the interior of Asia. From 
every height which the traveller attains, he 
may descry a horizon teeming with wonder 
and with fancy, out of the ignorance and 
silence of whose purple mystery no voice has 
come, these hundred years. There are for- 
ests, the refuge of the wild clog and the 
wilder man, the fierce Maroon, the black 
pioneer of doom, haunting the outskirts of 
a tyrannous civilization. There are moun- 
tains, unmeasured and ungauged, couching, 
it may be, above treasures which the venge- 
ful Cemis hid from the greedy murderers of 
his mild worshippers. 

Much of the inhabited interior, too, is as 
little visited as the western slopes of the 
southern Alleghanies. The primitive method 
of travelling, and the antique hospitality of 
the rural regions, throw a charm of mediaa- 
val unreality over scenes that may be really 
explored. The magnificent vale of Mariel, 
fair as those outer realms of Paradise over 
which the eyes of Adam ranged from his 



132 GAN-EDEN. 

a heaven-kissing verdurous walls ; " the ro- 
mantic cliffs that mirror their wealth of flow- 
ers in the green glistening waters of the 
winding Canimar ; the mighty steeps of the 
Loma de Indra, from whose heights the view 
sweeps to either ocean, and away to the dim 
blue hills of Jamaica; the endless fragrant 
palm-studded solitudes of the south-west; the 
picturesque ravines of the north-east, where 
young girls may be seen riding on the backs 
of oxen ; the subterranean streams gushing 
suddenly into the moonlight from the black- 
ness of the sumideros, or caverns, which hon- 
eycomb the surface of the island; the hun- 
dred sequestered nooks where still the gua- 
giro chants his rude improvisations, melodi- 
ous and full of meaning as the cries of a 
bellman, or the songs of a gondolier, and 
charms, in the skilful gymnastics of the zap- 
ateado, groups of soft-eyed girls, graceful as 
the palm-trees arching overhead; all these 
you reach over roads that transport you to 
the middle ages. Rudely marked out with 
limits which the irrepressible gush of vege- 
table life is continually obliterating, worn 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 133 

by the huge wheels of ox-carts, often lead- 
ing you through the small rivers of the 
country, and always guiltless of even the 
semblance of a bridge, these "highways" 
make intelligible to you old Froissart's hesi- 
tation in recording the feat of that young 
Percy, who actually travelled from Berlin to 
Ghent in fourteen days, to join the army of 
king Edward III* Riding along these 
wretched roads you meet only the most pri- 
meval vehicles, long files of packhorses and 
mules, and armed' horsemen glittering with 
spur and sword. 

In bygone years, all invalids who visited 
the island were obliged to find their way 
into the interior, depending upon the un- 



* The dweller in the land, who does n't care for the middle 
ages, looks with small complacency upon these roads. A friend 
of mine imported from Antwerp some machinery, which was 
sent about seventy miles into the interior, to his estate. The 
cost of land transportation was much greater than the freight 
across the Atlantic. 

One is struck in Havana by the apparent waste of power in 
the manner of loading the maloja, or green fodder, on the backs of 
mules. But a single trip into the country satisfies you, that a five 
miles' journey in a cart would turn the greenest fodder into exe- 
crable hay. 

12 



134 GAN-EDEN. 

failing hospitality of the planters. Now the 
coast lines of railway have changed the sys- 
tem, and a few well-known boarding-houses, 
comparatively easy of access, secure the 
traveller a sufficient variety of scene and 
atmosphere. Most of these places are on the 
northern shore, though the southern towns 
are within an easy journey of Havana now, 
by the Batabano railway and the steamers 
which run along the coast. Guines, Buena 
Esperanza, and Limonar are the points to 
which strangers are generally directed. The 
intelligent author of " Notes on Cuba," Dr. 
Wurdeman, considers Limonar the most de- 
sirable spring residence on the island. It 
may be reached now easily by railway, en- 
joys a most delicious climate, and offers the 
further attraction of comfortable houses, 
well kept and in a cheerful neighborhood. 
Guines, which used to be the most celebrated 
hospital town in Cuba, has sunk in impor- 
tance of late years. The rides in the neigh- 
borhood are pleasant, though by no means 
so lovely as those about Limonar, This con- 
sideration is of the first consequence for 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 135 

convalescents. Nothing can be more fatal 
than confinement to a great dreary board- 
ing-honse in a foreign country. I shall 
never forget the melancholy face of a young 
American lady whom I saw at Guines, left 
there with her young child, to recover from 
an attack premonitory of consumption. She 
had not been out of the house for days, and 
though it was plain that her health had not 
been seriously shaken by her disease, the 
solitude and wof illness of her situation were 
doing her more harm than all the winds of 
the East could have wrought. The balmiest 
climate can do little for the body while the 
mind is nipped and chilled. One sees many 
people in Cuba who seem to be taking the 
sweet air, just as they would take black 
draughts and blue pills. Of course it is not 
surprising that they derive no more benefit 
from the one than from the other. Those 
who can visit the tropics in favorable cir- 
cumstances, and before disease has destroyed 
their power of enjoyment, should, be in all 
ways encouraged to undertake the voyage. 
To them Cuba will be indeed a " Garden of 



136 GAN-EDEN. 

Delight." To all others it is quite as likely 
to be a u Garden of Death." If a man is left- 
alone with his ailing consciousness, unable to 
comprehend the life going on around him, 
brought into none but mercenary relations 
with his fellow-creatures, and cannot run 
away; a sick deer in a strange herd, what 
can he do but die ? And such is the vigor 
of that nature, death grows as rapidly as 
life. Decay does not crumble, it crushes. 

Eeckless as is the temper of modern times, 
death among strangers must still be dread- 
ful to all who have ever loved a home. All 
that accompanies death, too, in Cuba, is par- 
ticularly repulsive. Difficulties are thrown 
in the way of the becoming burial of those 
who die out of the communion of the Holy 
Church of Ferdinand VII. and Isabella II. 
The Campos Santos ? or burial-grounds, are 
vile places, where corpses are thrown aside 
as they are in Italy, without respect and 
without memorials even so lasting as the 
widow's tears or the tolling of the funeral 
bell. Before burial, the dead, dressed in the 
gayest manner, are exposed on catafalques 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 137 

set around with candles, in the great saloon 
of their homes. Ghastly faces stare sud- 
denly out on you from within the iron-barred 
windows, as you walk the city streets. Un- 
coffined and unshrouded, for the most part, 
the dead are flung into shallow graves, 
whence they will soon be jostled by their 
successors in the endless procession. Dark 
stories are told of those who have charge of 
these interments. A certain countess, who 
died near by us in Havana, was laid out in 
state and superbly arrayed. When the, day 
of the funeral came, one of the friends with 
a knife, cut into shreds the fine silks and sat- 
ins of her robes, making them valueless as 
merchandise. 

Among the conservative old Spanish a 
great deal of formality obtains in the mat- 
ter of mourning. It is considered proper 
for the family to shroud every thing in the 
house of death. Pictures are turned to the 
wall, furniture gloomily draped. Immedi- 
ately after the funeral, all the relations and 
connections of the deceased meet at the 
house, where they dine together, the family 
12* 



138 GAN-EDEN. 

keeping out of the way in private rooms till 
after dinner, when they appear, and two 
great circles are formed in the saloon, the 
females gathering into one and the males 
into another. Lugubrious conversation then 
commences. This ceremony is repeated 
daily during nine days ! and is plainly only 
a variation of, and as plainly not an im- 
provement upon, the barbaric mourning of 
the East. 



CHAPTER XI. 

" Destiny cast them among the plantations, and the gardens, where 
were fruits growing in clusters." Akabian Nights. 

The great sugar estates of Cuba lie in 
the Vuelta Arriba, the a upper district/' the 
region of the famous " red earth." The face 
of this region smiles with prosperity. In 
every direction the traveller rides astonished 
through a garden of plenty, equally im- 
pressed by the magnificent extent, and the 
profuse fertility of the estates whose palm 
avenues, plantain orchards, and cane fields 
succeed each other in almost unbroken suc- 
cession. Many of these properties yield 
princely revenues, and are worked by 
"gangs" of slaves, much larger than are 
common in the American States. The orig- 



140 GAN-EDEN. 

inal outlay upon such an estate is very large, 
although land can be procured cheaply 
enough, and the expenses of management 
are very heavy. The salaries of engineers 
upon estates worked in the old-fashioned 
manner, average about one hundred and 
twenty dollars a month, during the grinding 
season. But the French machinery- is con- 
ducted by persons of superior capacity, who 
are tempted hither from Europe or America 
by the offer of permanent situations at much 
higher salaries. Four or five such persons 
must be maintained upon a large estate. 
To the amount thus expended, must be 
added the wages of white subordinates, the 
expenses of five hundred or of a thousand 
negroes, the value of cattle annually de- 
stroyed, the incidental outlay, and in the 
majority of cases, the interest upon the large 
sums which the planter has borrowed in a 
country where money has an extraordinary 
value. Yet so productive are the estates, 
and so steady is the demand for the plant- 
er's crop, that the great sugar planters of 
Cuba are in truth princes of agriculture. 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 141 

Cholera, sweeping away troops of his slaves, 
the match of an envious, or the cigar of a 
careless montero kindling a flame that nothing 
can arrest, are alike powerless to interrupt 
seriously the prosperous career of an intel- 
ligent and enterprising hacendado. The rui- 
nous practice of absenteeism, which pre- 
pared for the British West Indies that 
sudden ruin, so often and so unjustly charged 
upon emancipation, is comparatively un- 
known in Cuba. The administradores of the 
Cuban estates are frequently members of 
the proprietor's family. And the proprietors 
themselves generally pass a part of the year 
on their estates. The master's eye keeps 
watch over those admirable arrangements 
and tasteful decorations, which make a great 
sugar estate so delightful to the stranger. 
Particularly beautiful are the estates to 
which a cafetal is attached. The coffee cul- 
ture was introduced by the French refugees 
from Hayti, men of taste and refinement, 
who in laying out the grounds of their new 
homes, took thought for the beautiful as 
well as for the useful. The Spaniards gen- 



142 GAN-EDEN. 

erally, (Garcilaso to the contrary notwith- 
standing) seem to have done but little for 
the advance of landscape gardening, and the 
glorious opportunities offered by Cuba to the 
art, have been little improved excepting in 
the cafetales. Although Brazil has quite 
broken down the Cuban coffee trade, these 
coffee estates are still numerous in the Vu- 
elta Arriba, where they are kept up on the 
French models, chiefly as ornaments to the 
sugar estates, vegetable farms, and homes 
for the younger or the decrepit negroes. 
The imposing scale of the operations on a 
great ingenio, imparts a character of barbaric 
regal state to the life one leads there. The 
haracon becomes a town, the planter a feudal 
lord, administering hospitalities as lavish as 
the bounty of the climate and the soil. 
Living in such a region, one soon enters into 
the spirit of that eastern munificence and 
profusion which disdains limits and calcula- 
tions. The singular number falls into disre- 
pute. A kind of gorgeous superfluity seems 
only fit and becoming. Your thought is all 
" of Africa and golden joys." The luxuri- 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 143 

ous seductions of the land persuade you 
into a new charity towards men so superbly 
tempted. The energy with which the ad- 
ministradores address themselves to their 
work is surprising to you. You feel as if 
the calls of prudence, in such a region, might 
well enough be met in the spirit of Nou- 
redclin, when to all his steward's remon- 
strances he calmly answered, "Know 
steward ! that if thou hast in thy hands 
what will suffice for my dinner, thou shalt 
not burden me with anxiety respecting my 
supper ! " 

Looking at them simply as an entertain- 
ment, the mills of these great sugar estates 
are not incongruous with the easy delight 
of the place. Every thing is open and airy, 
and the processes of the beautiful steam 
machinery go on without the odors as with- 
out the noises that make most manufacto- 
ries odious. Many ingenious applications 
of chemical and mechanical science lend an 
interest to the De Eosny trains,* which were 

* The term train is given to the succession of boilers and vats 
through which the cane juice passes in the course of its transmu- 
tation into sugar. 



144 GAN-EDEN. 

invented by a Frenchman who had never 
seen a sugar estate, and who on coming to 
the West Indies, could not work profitably 
his own machinery. The most interesting 
to me of these arrangements was the cen- 
trifugal process. The molasses, which on the 
old-fashioned estates eventually distils into 
diamond drops of aguardiente, is converted 
by this process into sugar. It passes into a 
large vat, by the side of which is a row of 
double cylinders, the outer one of solid 
metal, the inner of wire gauze. These cyl- 
inders revolve each on an axis attached by 
a horizontal wheel and band to a shaft 
which communicates with the central engine. 
The molasses is ladled out into the spaces 
between the external and internal cylinders, 
and the axes are set in motion at the rate 
of nineteen hundred revolutions a minute. 
For three minutes you see only a white in- 
distinct whirling; then the motion is ar- 
rested; slowly and more slowly the cylin- 
ders revolve, then stop, and behold ! the 
whole inner surface of the inner cylinder is 
covered with beautiful crystallizations of a 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 145 

light yellow sugar ! Watching this inge- 
nious process, I used to fancy that somewhat 
in this wise, might the nebulse of space be 
slowly fashioning into worlds. 

But the cafetal is after all the great charm 
of these northern ingenios. On one of the love- 
liest in the island, I spent a season,the brevity 
of which I shall always regret. Early in the 

inspiring morning, my friend Don used 

to summon me for a drive. A dozen ne- 
groes would appear,to harness one little lively 
horse, into a light American wagon, bought 
by my friend for the purpose of driving over 
the thirteen miles of sugar and coffee es- 
tates, on which he has made good broad 
roads. A whole pack of dogs started off 
before us, yelping, leaping, and darting in 
all directions, and then we dashed away at 
a brisk pace, through the seemingly endless 
cane fields. The heavy dew, glittering on 
the waves of green, gave them a soft bril- 
liancy ; the cloudless skies, the buoyant air, 
beguiled the way, till we drove into the 
cool shades of the plardaneria, or plantain 
grove, the unfailing adjunct of all estates 
13 . 



146 GAN-EDEN. 

in this land, where plantain and pork are as 
much the staff of life to the montero, and 
the negro, as are beef and water to the 
guacho, or bacon and greens to the Virgin- 
ian. The plantain tree, though by no 
means lofty or imposing — looking, indeed, 
more like a seedy cabbage with long leaves 
or an overgrown flag, than like a tree — still 
reaches the height of twenty feet or more, 
and its heavy dark green leaves nodding 
over the ruddy ground, make a delightful 
shade, a sort of cool baptistery, from which 
you pass into the statelier sanctuaries of the 
cafeial There the full-leaved orange, the 
thrifty, dark, glossy foliage of the mango, 
the tall elm-like aguacate, the coneshaped 
mamey, cover the land on both sides as far 
as the eye can reach. Everywhere you see 
the light, shrubby outlines of the coffee 
plant springing up beneath the taller trees. 
Avenues, miles in length, lead to the differ- 
ent quarters of the estate, and formed as 
they are of the full exuberant mango, or the 
branching aguacate, planted alternately with 
the towering royal palm, become forest 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 147 

aisles of surpassing beauty. The height of 
the palms is immense, many of them rising 
more than a hundred and twenty feet into 
the air. Overtopping thus the other trees, 
their sweeping noble arches do not exclude 
the sunlight, which pours through the inter- 
vals as through the clere-story windows of a 
cathedral, and illuminates the green solem- 
nity of the majestic colonnades. 

The cottage of the cafetal was an elegantly 
proportioned little tropical mansion, cool, 
dark, floored with marble, wainscoted, and 
furnished with rich cleep-hued Indian woods. 
A garden filled with heavy blooms, of jas- 
mine and roses, and the gorgeous purple 
Carolina, and a hundred drooping odorous 
flowers, made the air faint with fragrance. 
A dense grove of orange trees near by, was 
lighted up through all its recesses by the 
glowing fruit. Oranges lay all about on the 
bright red earth, little naked negroes kick- 
ing aside, and satiated pigs disdainfully neg- 
lecting great luscious fruit, which the North 
would pile with pride, upon salvers of silver 
and porcelain. 



148 GAN-EDEN. 

Whenever we rode over to the cafetal, we 
always found lying on the marble tables of 
the saloon, a heap of these superb oranges, 
with the morning still in their fragrance, or 
a huge golden pineapple. 

Pineapples, like poets, appear to the best 
advantage at home. The ripe orange from 
the tree has a delicate atmosphere of its 
own, but in substance is hardly better than 
a well ripened orange from the fruiterer's 
shop. The " lush banana," is never allowed 
to ripen on the tree, as it falls out of its 
sheltering purple glove immediately on 
coming to maturity. Miss Bremer, there- 
fore, might have " made friends " with the 
banana, as well in New York as in Havana. 
But the pineapple of Cuba is another crea- 
ture from that stringy, sour, indigestible 
thing which we tolerate for the chance of its 
aroma, just as people who have no Italian 
read Hoole's Ariosto. It is as unquestionably 
the king among tropical fruits, as is Bur- 
gundy among the wines of France. The 
famous aguacate is really no fruit, but a veg- 
etable, eatable only as a salad, and of the 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 149 

daintiest. The zapote, that potato-faced 
peach, and the mamey, are rich and sweet, 
but lack savor. And generally, the West 
Indian fruits are decidedly inferior in deli- 
cacy and pungency of flavor to the fruits of 
the temperate zones, and of the east. The 
lordly, aromatic strawberry, the melting 
odoriferous pear, the peach, that carries in 
its ruddy heart such sweet memories of its 
Persian home, "the cherry delighting the 
sense of every man," these are unrivalled in 
Cuba. The universal monotone of the 
tropics is struck for the palate too. The 
fruits lack piquancy, as the inland landscape 
almost invariably lacks the life of running 
water. 

I have already spoken of the exceeding 
beauty of the Cuban nights, and of the 
golden moon, which pours over the tropical 
landscape a flood of luxurious splendor, quite 
unimaginable by those who have but 
watched her climb the northern skies with 
a wan face, and with sad steps. Beneath 
the moon, too, and the stars, the night 
glances with living meteors. The cucullos 
13* 



150 GAN-EDEN. 

are indeed inconceivably brilliant. " Watch- 
men of the insects/' serenos de los bichos, a 
lovely quickwitted boy of four summers, 
the child of one of my friends, called these 
torchbearers, when he first saw them; and 
flying in long lines, with their double lights, 
they do produce an effect similar to that of 
the long processions of the watch at Ha- 
vana. They are quiet, however, in wdiich 
they do not resemble those worthies, who 
must be called serenos in irony, for they 
make night dreadful with periodical howls, 
much more prolonged and eloquent than 
the similar uproar with which peace is 
hourly proclaimed at night in Philadelphia. 
The light of the ciicuUo is really strong 
enough to serve as a candle. It is also very 
delicate, a fine green luminousness, precisely 
like the effulgence which emeralds shed 
upon a lovely neck. But the emeralds of 
inca or sultan may soon be counted, and these 
glories are showered indifferently into the 
verandah of the noble, and the baracon of 
the slave. Children delight in them, keep- 
ing them shut up, by forties and fifties, in 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 151 

little cages of reeds. They are carefully 
washed at morning and night, and fed with 
sugar-cane, (if fed with sugar the saccharine 
particles adhere to their legs, and they fall 
upon each other like Kilkenny cats,) and in 
this way may be kept alive and shining for 
many days. They have been carried thus 
to New York, and set free in Broadway to 
the great wonderment of the Gothamites. 
The nature of their light I do not know. 
But all the underpart of the body is trans- 
parent, and the light appears to be under 
the cucullo's control, flashing and failing 
like the bottled up auroras of Professor 

L at Cambridge. 

The calm eternal stars, look hardly more 
divine than these mortal stars, that seem 
sent to cheat us poor moths, out of our 

" Devotion to something afar 
From the sphere of our sorrow," 

into a desire for more accessible, though 
more evanescent, joys. Once I caught some 
and gave them to a little girl, who forth- 
with hung them around her light dress, say- 



152 GAN-EDEN. 

ing, that " God had made them with hooks 
to fasten on little girl's dresses." An inde- 
feasible inference ! the hooks are certainly 
there. 

Did God also make mahogany trees to be 
hacked into canoes ? One day I saw a 
couple of Africans hewing away, to convert 
a noble mahogany trunk into a mere vulgar 
" dug-out." Probably Mr. Euskin would call 
the destiny of that trunk more divine, in 
being true as an honest, clumsy dug-out, 
than in coming with a smooth and var- 
nished face, as the deceitful veneering of a 
pinewood table, to cherish dyspepsia and 
scandal in polite society ! 



CHAPTER XII. 

"Ho! ho! " cried Orlando, "you too are for throwing stones, are 

yOU?" MORGANTE MAGGIORE. 

Nobthekn life is not all peaches and roses. 
Neither, alas ! is the life of the tropics only 
pineapples and pleasant breathing. To me, 
Cuba was, in the main, a garden of delight, 
"where my heart was dilated, and my 
anxiety ceased." And so far I have recorded 
chiefly the delectable impressions which I 
retain of the island. Were I writing of an- 
cient Iceland or modern Tongataboo, I might 
forbear handling more painful themes, ob- 
serving a discreet silence concerning Snor- 
ro's little weakness of piracy, and Amekam- 
eha's passion for foreign flesh. When we 
think of the Caliph in Gan-Eden, why need 
we remember Sheikh Ibrahim, preparing 
slight bastinadoes for improper characters at 
the gate ? But there are Cubans in Cuba, 



154 GAN-EDEN. 

and it is of no slight importance to under- 
stand what manner of men they are. As 
they seemed to me, so I must describe them ; 
if need be, " throwing stones." I beg thee, 
reader, to believe that I am led to this task 
by no such instinct as sometimes constrains 
the mildest of boys to " have a shy " at the 
meekest of cats, when he sees her conspicu- 
ous on a shed in the sun. That Marid and 
taskmaster of the Anglo-Saxon race, " a 
sense of duty," is the responsible party. 
Consequently I shall be as faithful in the 
work as I am reluctant to commence it. 

When the brave town of Marblehead lay 
beyond the borders of civilization, every 
bewildered traveller who mistook that mu- 
nicipal blind alley for a thoroughfare, used 
to be greeted with a savage salaam of siza- 
ble pebbles, accompanied with the intima- 
tion that a small pecuniary tribute was in- 
dispensable. Cuba offered me tribute before 
I evinced any hostile disposition. Had I 
exacted of all the Creoles I happened to 
meet, a just discharge of all their promises, 
I should now be a large landholder in the 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 155 

island, and possess horses enough to mount 
a regiment. But the remembrance of all 
those unliquidated obligations shall not, I 
hope, delay or divert my hand. 

Of course, Cuba has great distinctions of 
society. There, in the first place, is the vast 
gulf between white and black Cuba. Of the 
darker side of that gulf I shall hereafter 
speak. I have to deal now with the grada- 
tions of life in white Cuba. 

The whites in Cuba numbering, I suppose, 
(for nobody exactly knows,) about four hun- 
dred thousand souls,* are divided primarily 
into old Spaniards, or Peninsulars, and Cre- 
oles. The old Spaniards fill all the offices 
of the island, and transact by far the greater 
part of its commercial affairs. 

The mother country has been in the habit 
of applying her sons, like leeches, to the 
bodies of her colonies, and the successive 
generations of old Spaniards have come 
upon the Indies, like those great waves of 
barbaric invasion which swept over the 

* The unreliable census of 1849, says 457,132. 



156 GAN-EDEN. 

Eoman Empire. Naturally enough the old 
Spaniard looks clown upon the Creole with 
the contempt of a conqueror. Not less nat- 
urally the Creole regards his kinsmen of Cas- 
tile with a sort of spiteful aversion. The 
bright-eyed boy at the cafe curls his full lip 
with scorn,when you ask him if he was born 
in Cuba, and his shrill treble grows a clarion 
in the reply, " No, Senor ! soy Asturiano ! " 
The judge on the bench, the beaten soldier 
at the barracks, assume towards the native of 
the island, something of the port with which 
an Alvarado or a Sandoval imposed respect 
upon the defeated Aztec. But the Spanish 
superiority does not consume itself in sneers 
and airs. The old Spaniards monopolize the 
most profitable traffic. The Catalans, the 
yankees of old Spain, the hard-headed, 
shrewd Catalans, faithful to their motto of 
"five years of privations, and a fortune," 
are to be found in every town and hamlet, 
and in every stage of social development, 
from the domestic grub, toilsomely outspin- 
ning the brilliant cocoon that is to be, up or 
down to the gay and gorgeous butterfly of 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 157 

the second generation, rejoicing in the sun- 
shine of fashionable life. The Catalans are 
generally very loyal, for they enjoy a num- 
ber of monopolies which, like all monopolists, 
they blindly and ignorantly cherish, to the 
serious injury of Cuba. Political economy 
in Spain seems to be just abreast with the 
wisdom of the age of Walpole. For instance, 
the flour monopoly so protects the exporters 
of Ferrol and Santander, that the wheat of 
northern Spain, originally very good, is 
forced upon the Cuban markets, after under- 
going voyages of such a length, that one can 
only account for them, by supposing that 
each captain, on every trip, has to find 
the new world all over again, without refer- 
ence to Columbus ! It was the loyal Cata- 
lans who clamored most loudly for the exe- 
cution of the foolish and unfortunate men 
of the Lopez expedition. General Concha 
was forced to threaten the Catalan leaders 
in order to restrain their indiscreet zeal. 
What nerves indeed are so sensitive as those 
of trade ? Governments, not royal, have not 
disdained to embrace the patriotism which 
14 



158 GAN-EDEN. 

started into life at the first thrill of a pecu- 
niary panic ! 

More irreconcilably hostile than the mer- 
chants to the Creole population, are the 
old Spanish officials. It is really hard to 
exaggerate the extent to which bribery and 
corruption are carried among these persons, 
or the annoyances to which the unprotected 
natives are subjected at the hands of Dog- 
berrys clothed with more or less authority. 
At Havana, it is notoriously impossible to 
procure any paper of importance at the 
government house, without employing an 
agente or general broker, a limited number 
of whom are licensed by the government. 
I tried the experiment myself of applying 
personally for a certain document, but after 
dancing attendance for nearly a week in 
the large and little rooms of the Palace, I 
gave it up and put the matter into the hands 
of an agente, who within the day brought 
me the required parchment stamped con- 
spicuously with the word gratis, and de- 
manded seven dollars as the price thereof! 
These fees are of course divided with the 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 159 

subordinates at the Palace. The whole 
thing is in the purest oriental taste, but one 
must be very immoral to enjoy it. 

Throughout the country, the "paternal" 
government is as affectionately watchful over 
the people as a duenna aunt over a pretty 
niece, and as judiciously firm as an old-fash- 
ioned schoolmaster. Englishmen and Amer- 
icans, more accustomed to worry than to be 
worried by their governments, can hardly 
bring themselves to believe in the reality of 
such an incessant, inquisitive, undignified 
tyranny as prevails wherever a " strong gov- 
ernment " is " maintaining order." I knew 
one man, whose small property happened to 
lie on the road taken by a party of troops 
conveying some miserable prisoners of the 
Lopez " army " to Havana. One of these 
captives fell by the way, and was left to die. 
Found by some negroes, the dying man was 
visited by the planter of whom I speak, car- 
ried to his house and cared for. He, how- 
ever, soon died. This act of humanity being 
illegal, the planter became a marked man. 
Military requisitions of carts were made 



160 GAN-EDEN. 

upon him in the height of the grinding 
season, vexatious searches, and all sorts of 
small annoyances inflicted upon him. Nat- 
urally enough, the object of this despicable 
persecution sometimes gave vent to his feel- 
ings in injudicious language. The doctrine 
of " constructive treason " being thoroughly 
understood in Cuba, he was at last arrested, 
carried to Havana, and was lying there in 
prison when I left the island. 

Visiting the house of a friend one day, in 
the country, I found there an old woman 
wrinkled as only Spanish Creoles can be 
wrinkled, who was tearfully discoursing 
about her imprisoned son, whom she had 
that day for the first time been allowed to 
see. The youth, it seemed, was alone in a 
damp, dirty cell, and compelled to eat his 
vile meals without so much as a spoon. His 
poor old mother told us she had been at 
work all day, carving out two little wooden 
spoons for him. " Muy bien hechas," " very 
well made," she said they were ; and who 
would wish to doubt it? My heart was 
moved by the poor creature's story, but I 



PICTURES OP CUBA. 161 

forbore to ask any questions while she was 
present, for what a dreadful creature, what 
a Cuban Jack Sheppard, laughing like love 
at locksmiths, and rich in resources as Monte 
Cristo's Abbe, must that criminal be, who 
was thought capable of making his way 
through a stone wall with a German silver 
teaspoon! To my amazement, my friend 
informed me that the prisoner was a lad re- 
markable only for his poverty of spirit, a 
flat fool in short, who lived on an estate only 
as an incumbrance attached to his father the 
overseer. This poor numbskull, going to 
the Tienda, thought to give himself impor- 
tance among the open-mouthed monteros, by 
announcing that an American fleet had been 
seen off Cape Antonio, bringing a mighty 
army to avenge Las Pozas ! For this silly 
lie, the boy had then been incarcerated more 
than five months ! and might be for years, 
since even in the regular course of law, a 
trial is no necessary consequence of an ar- 
rest, and the military authorities, right or 
wrong, think it always best to make their 
mark on their prizes. 

14* 



162 GAN-EDEN. 

In another partido, a lawyer of eminence 
arrested at his own house in the night, re- 
mained four months in prison, ineomumcado, 
allowed, that is, to see no one. At the end 
of that time, with no explanations given, he 
was turned out, and sent home, to find his 
wife dead, and his affairs in complete dis- 
order. 

A Brazilian gentleman, deputed by his 
government to examine the sugar and to- 
bacco culture, happened in the course of his 
journeys to stay in my neighborhood, with 
a Creole of high intelligence, who was sus- 
pected of republicanism, and convicted of 
manliness and independence. This was 
enough to bring suspicion on the envoy of 
a friendly empire, who was summoned be- 
fore the Capitan de Partido. After many 
absurd questions, "Why don't you study 
tobacco-growing in the United States?" 
asked the official. "Perhaps I shall," an- 
swered the shrewd Brazilian, " but I dislike 
the institutions of that country so much that 
I am in no hurry to go there ! " This was 
enough. The examination came to a pleas- 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 163 

ant ending, not without the offer and accept- 
ance of a "token of regard." 

No man can be trusted with irresponsible 
power, and the system which multiplies 
petty authorities beyond the reach of pub- 
lic opinion, must entail upon any country 
the curse which weighs on Cuba. To sup- 
port the army which keeps this swarm of 
functionaries safe, the Cubans are taxed 
much more heavily than any other civilized 
people* 

From the officials, who aptly enough sup- 
ply the places of the venomous and annoy- 
ing insects from which Cuba is singularly 
free, I pass to that great body of the natives 
on which they feed. 

The first conquerors of Cuba, like Harri- 
son at Naseby field, "did not their work 
negligently." The name of the second com- 
mercial city of the island, Matanzas, or the 
Massacres, commemorates, it is said, the last 

* For full details of the despotic administration, and of the 
taxation of Cuba, which, as there stated, amounts in the gross to 
about 2^ per cent, per annum, on $800,000,000, the total of 
property in the island, I refer the reader to the excellent work 
entitled " Cuba and the Cubans," published at New York in 1850. 



164 GAN-EDEN. 

of the great slaughters which overtook the 
idolatrous Indians, who were so profane as 
to object to the combined gift of slavery and 
salvation which the Christians proffered 
them. The trooper's sword and the miner's 
spade evangelized Cuba, and the present 
natives of the island, unlike the hybrid 
peons of the continent, are of pure Spanish 
blood. The twenty-two cities or towns of 
some size which exist in the island, contain a 
fair proportion of these Creoles, a few more 
are scattered over the great haciendas or 
estates of the sugar and coffee planters ; but 
the great majority of the native born whites 
is to be found on the vegas and tobacco 
farms, in the villages and hamlets of the in- 
terior. These are the people who must give 
to Cuba its chief national peculiarities. The 
planters, of course, give tone to the highest 
ranks of Cuban society. To their number 
belong the thirty or forty marquises and 
counts of Cuba, the " sugar nobles," as the 
old Spaniards call them in disdain, though 
one might suppose that if blood may be 
used to clarify sugar, sugar may reasonably 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 165 

enough be used to clarify blood, and it is hard 
to see why a title honestly bought with good 
gold doubloons is not quite as good a thing 
as a title taken by force of arms, or pur- 
chased by worse than menial services ren- 
dered to some vulgar sensual prince. Closely 
allied with the planters are the great Creole 
merchants. Often very opulent, these Cre- 
oles of the first rank are almost always 
distinguished for the easy courtesy of their 
manners, and for the genial hospitality of 
their households. Nor are they wanting in 
enterprise. Cuba, in the matter of railways, 
may compare favorably with many of the 
American States, and the railways are the 
result of Creole energy and enterprise. The 
Creole planters are indefatigable in their 
efforts to improve their estates, and to de- 
velop the resources of their magnificent 
island. No one of the Southern States can 
show a finer, few can show so fine a body of 
intelligent and well-bred gentlemen as the 
haciendas and the cities of Cuba may be 
justly proud of possessing. The women of 
this class generally exhibit those qualities 



166 GAN-EDEN. 

of warm and devoted affection which so 
universally adorn the female history of the 
Spanish race. But the imperfection of their 
education, in many cases, and in many more 
the absence of noble incitements to mental 
and moral activity, condemns these fine na- 
tures to a life which withers and wastes 
their best energies. From these higher 
classes of Cuban society have come the most 
enlightened and fervent advocates of Cuban 
liberty and independence. Were we to 
judge of the intellectual and moral re- 
sources of the island, by the proofs, with 
which the poets, patriots, and orators of this 
class have furnished us, of cultivated powers 
and lofty aspirations, we should go far be- 
yond the mark. With the exception of the 
extraordinary mulatto of Matanzas, Placido * 
all those Cubans who have distinguished 
themselves generously, in literature or in life, 
belong to the planting or urbane classes. 
The multitudinous hamlets and villages, 
the ancient vegas of the interior, have given 
us neither song nor speech. This fact is 

* And Placido himself, it will be seen, was a citizen. 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 167 

ominously significant, nor does a closer in- 
vestigation dispel its significance. 

In all the island in 1840, out of more than 
ninety thousand free children, only nine 
thousand attended any school, and of these 
only one third were educated at the public ex- 
pense, that is to say, had their ears pulled and 
were beaten by certain incompetent friars. 
The much abused Turks are not more illit- 
erate than the rural Cubans. Newspapers 
only reach the interior in the form of wrap- 
pers. Dr. Wurdeman tells us of one yeo- 
man, well-to-do in the world, who had bought 
a school geography from a peddler for twenty- 
five dollars, kept it ostentatiously in sight, 
and professed to have learned therein that 
the English and Americans were the most 
notorious stabbers in the world ! This man 
must have been a superfluous hypocrite, for 
most of his fellows have a fine scorn of let- 
ters. My friend told me one day that 

a neighbor of his had just been condoling 
with him about his insane visitor ; insane I 
must be, it was clear, for I had been seen 
very often, reading a book in the verandah ! 



168 GAN-EDEN. 

Great as is my respect for books, I do not 
regard a knowledge of the alphabet as es- 
sential to human excellence. Charlemagne 
contrived to make his mark tolerably intel- 
ligible, long before he could write his name, 
and Caesar Borgia was a better scholar than 
John Bunyan. The ignorance of the Cuban 
mind would be far from hopeless, were the 
Cuban heart enlightened by that sweet 
knowledge, of which all the lore of the 
brain is, and ought to be, the very humble 
slave and servant. But this is not so. The 
education of the popular heart and con- 
science belongs chiefly, of course, to the 
church. And the church in Cuba has prac- 
tically abdicated its spiritual functions. The 
tyrannical ostentation of religious uniformity 
is indeed kept up, all Protestant settlers 
being obliged to abjure their faith before 
their oath of allegiance can be received; 
perjury opening the door for loyalty to walk 
in. But the majority of the Cubans hardly 
give themselves the pains to pretend to an 
interest in church matters. The attendance 
on the church services is usually meagre. 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 169 

The newspapers indeed, in the dearth of 
immaculate matter for their rigidly expur- 
gated columns, devote a goodly space every 
morning to compendious biographies of the 
saints of the day. But the people who read 
the newspapers, the merchants and men of 
business, are rarely seen within the church 
walls. Were it not for the zeal " devoti 
fasminei sexus," as good San Carlo Borromeo 
long since called them, the Havana churches 
would be as empty as San Stefano Rotondo, 
or any other of those stranded old Roman 
ships of faith, which lie so high and dry, 
beached on shores from which the tides of 
human life receded centuries ago. Neither 
painting nor music, nor the mere magnifi- 
cence of gold and jewels, invests the ritual 
of Cuba with attractive pomp. And what 
is so dismal as shabby Romanism, the 'i scar- 
let woman " in rags and tatters ? The old 
French Encyclopedic reviles the church in 
Cuba, for being so "revoltingly rich." The 
riches have taken unto themselves wings, 
and though a few of the dignitaries still 
enjoy large incomes, the scanty revenues of 
15 



170 GAN-EDEN. 

the church greatly limit its power for good, 
and aggravate its worst influences. The 
church in Italy, or in Austria, is like Thack- 
eray's Louis le Grand, stately in high-heeled 
shoes and nodding periwig, glittering with 
the factitious kingliness of velvet coats and 
diamond stars ; the church in Cuba resem- 
bles the same Louis, diminished in shuffling 
slippers, and with bowed bald head shaking 
above his withered and decrepid limbs. 
This primitive simplicity of the rural church 
however, only affects the externals of things. 
Well says straightforward old Chaucer, "a 
foul priest cannot make a clean parish." Of 
course there are worthy and well-conducted 
men among the village curas of Cuba, but 
in general the ctira is regarded as a kind of 
civil officer, and he thinks as little of utter- 
ing, as his people do of hearing, homilies. 
Often he is only the best boon companion 
in his district, and the will of Gregory the 
Great seems to have been set aside by the 
common consent of clergy and people. One 
cannot wonder at the impulse which revolts 
from the unnatural and corrupting asceti- 



PICTUKES OF CUBA. 171 

cism of the Roman Church, but it certainly 
is a great misfortune for any country that 
its religious teachers should be constantly 
living in open violation of one of the most 
sacred rules of their order. In truth, there 
seems to be a tacit understanding between 
the priests and the people, that neither shall 
trouble the other \ the curas laugh and look 
after their nieces, their nephews, and their 
farms; the Monteros laugh, train fighting 
cocks, dance, blaspheme, make love, and 
play at monte. An oppressive government 
and a tempting climate complete the edu- 
cation of the yeomanry, for so we may ren- 
der the title of monteros^ which is given to 
the rural whites. Is it hard to imagine 
the result ? The Condesa de Merlin, an en- 
tertaining Cuban Scheherezade, who was by 
no means critical in her collation of author- 
ities, once gave an account of the monteros, 
which resembled the reality of montero life 
and character, just about as closely as Made- 
moiselle de Scuderi's Persians resembled the 
friends and followers of the great Cyrus. 
According to her, the montero cavalier was 



172 GAN-EDEN. 

a true knight and pilgrim of love, able to 
ride fabulous distances, on steeds noble and 
dear as Bavieea, outwatching the stars, and 
with his lute " striking ladies into trouble, 
as his sword struck men to death." Done 
into pretty French, the Condesa's rich ro- 
mance perfumed all the saloons of Paris. 
The altars of Chateaubriand and St. Pierre, 
of Paul and Chactas smoked again. Scoff- 
ing debauchery, garde beurre frais, raved 
about the majestic silence, and primeval 
passion of the tropic forest, to sentimental 
insincerity in gauze. Nature, gayly cos- 
tumed and scented with the south, became 
presentable and even fashionable. The Cu- 
ban guagiro was not less fascinating than 
Fra Diavolo. With him, with the Mexican 
jarocho, and the Chilian pincheyra, the New 
World was no longer savage. Less roman- 
tic and more scrupulous writers than the 
Condesa, have yet painted the montero in 
the warm hues with which the tropics had 
charged their palettes. A kindly man, 
travelling from hospitality to hospitality, 
and conscious every day of new vigor in 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 173 

every organ, new ease in the discharge of 
every physical function, naturally enough 
pours something of his own inward delight 
over every thing which he meets and sees. 
But those who are thrown, by the necessities 
of their position, into daily contact with a 
people, are the safest guides, and the testi- 
mony of all the planters I ever knew, goes 
to confirm the inferences I drew from my 
own observation, in regard to the montero 
and lower Creole character. I need not 
dwell upon the stories that are everywhere 
current, of the occasional brigandage to 
which the natives resort. Authentic in- 
stances came within my own knowledge of 
organizations formed for the purpose of high- 
way robbery by individuals of considerable 
standing. In one case, the leading lawyer 
of a certain town was discovered to be the 
chief of a set of banditti who had ravaged 
the adjacent country, and had actually 
stormed and taken one hamlet and storehouse 
of respectable size. This lawyer being 
brought to trial, escaped by oiling the hands 
of justice. His fortune went to Spain in 
15* 



174 GAN-EDEN. 

remittances from certain functionaries. He 
himself had leave to go to Mexico. His 
brother sold his estate to a friend of mine, 
who, on removing the barn, found six skele- 
tons quietly disposed beneath the floors. 
These instances might be paralleled, I know, 
nearer home.* But there can be no doubt 
that the monteros generally, entertain ideas 
with regard to the intrinsic propriety of pi- 
racy and robbery, much more in accordance 
with the theory and practice of the ancient 
Greeks, than of any modern people of the 
west. General Tacon, in the universal 
sweep which he made of all the liberties of 
Cuba, included the freedom of the road, and 
at present, those who go to Cuba with the 
expectation of seeing gentlemen drop sud- 
denly dead in the archways of the city, or 
of surrendering their own purses to a Claude 
Duval in leggings, will probably be disap- 
pointed. How much of the present security 
of the roads is clue to the energetic police 
force, and how much to the prevalent im- 
pression that firearms in the hands of an 

* As, for instance, in the " Martha Washington " case. 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 175 

Englishman or American, are dangerous and 
deadly things, it would be invidious to 
inquire. 

Indolent, beyond conception, the montero 
certainly is. His rule of action is, " Never 
do to-day what you can possibly put off till 
to-morrow." That cabalistic word "Mana- 
ma," "To-morrow," which comes upon the 
fjery northman's impatience from every 
Spanish lip, like the calm rebuke of the 
Egyptian's patient eyes, is ten times more 
appalling in the Creole mouth. You feel 
that to contend with it would be like dash- 
ing yourself against the barred doors of 
destiny. 

Nor is it much easier to load a restive 
mule, than to lay a responsibility upon the 
shoulders of a montero. His word is his 
slave. He is as cunning as Clovis, and as 
false as Lok. Yet one can understand how 
the montero contrives to leave such a pleas- 
ant impression on the minds of careless and 
contented travellers. He has a ready smile, 
a "well-placed word of glozing courtesy," 
warm with the phrases of the Moor, always 



176 GAN-EDEN. 

at his command. Rarely is the montero 
surly or quarrelsome. The easy audacity 
of his bearing is even attractive. The very 
boys are lordly in their laziness. Wander- 
ing over the tufted hills, you catch sight of 
a fine clump of cocoa palms, and your heated 
palate craves the refreshment which nature 
has hung up yonder in those unsightly cups. 
You look around you, and meet the flashing 
eyes of a hatless, shoeless urchin, just such 
a brown, white-toothed, glowing creature as 
Murillo loved, lying in the shade of a broken 
wall. You hail Lazarillo and tempt him 
with silver. He rises to his feet, with such 
a languid grace ! puts his fingers to his lips, 
and with one shrill whistle brings his father's 
only slave from the patch of land hard by? 
sends him up the smooth, difficult mast, and 
before you have recovered from your sur- 
prise, offers you half a dozen of the won- 
drous nuts ! 

Fond of cheap vices, and proud of cheap 
virtues, superstitious waiters upon Provi- 
dence in all matters of business, and bold 
blasphemers on the slightest provocation, 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 177 

the monteros have so little weight of char- 
acter, that they can inspire in each other no 
mutual confidence. I should judge them to 
be as incapable of maintaining a free and 
orderly polity, as were the Hindoos before 
the English conquest. In the event of any 
political commotion, it is clear that the mon- 
tero would side with the gods rather than 
with Cato. They hate the Spanish govern- 
ment, but dread the chances of an insurrec- 
tion. Individually, I dare say the monteros 
are not deficient in bravery, but regimented 
they must form a despicable militia, revers- 
ing the character of the French, who like 
grains of gunpowder, however sputtering 
they may be as units, are terrific in masses. 
Physically, the monteros are by no means 
an ill-looking race, though decidedly inferior, 
as are the Creoles in general, I think, to the 
natives of old Spain. Whether it be true 
or not, that the European races degenerate 
physically in the New World, is a question 
not here to be discussed. Certain it is that 
the Creoles are slighter in frame than the 
Peninsulars, that the common tones of the 



178 GAN-EDEN. 

Creole voice are less full and musical than 
those of the Spanish, and that the Creole 
has lost something of the direct, vivid glance 
of the Celtiberian race, a loss which is per- 
haps counterbalanced by the richer, softer 
beauty of the Creole eyes. In the rural 
districts, where the practice of shaving is 
very general, I was struck with the preva- 
lence of an Irish type of face. The Irish 
face of Kerry pleads strongly for the Mile- 
sian claims of the sons of Erin. But the 
Irish type I recognized in Cuba, is that more 
common, heavier, and less attractive type 
which all the world hails as belonging to 
the "finest pisintry on the earth." The 
montero, as you meet him riding along the 
Cuban roads, if roads they may be called, 
forms a striking feature in the novel land- 
scape. Mounted on the small, sturdy, pacing 
horse of the country, and sitting in his huge 
high-peaked saddle as carelessly as if in a 
cart, his brown skin, his wrought shirt, and 
baggy trowsers red with the dust of the soil, 
the montero, though by no means romantic, 
is certainly picturesque. His slouching som- 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 179 

brero flaps solemnly downward over his nose ; 
his stockingless, saintly * feet thrust into yel- 
lowish deerskin sandals, dangle in the heavy 
stirrups, and seem drawn backwards by the 
weight of his massive silver spurs ; the long, 
straight, silver-hilted machete jingles against 
the rows of silver buttons, sometimes in the 
shape of silver coin, that adorn the seams 
of his coarse trowsers. Our montero is 
plainly of the mind of that fashionable lady, 
who said she could easily dispense with the 
necessaries of life, but not with its luxuries. 
He must have his finery. This trait of his 
character makes the fortune of the Catalan 
traders who keep the Tiendas of the inte- 
rior. Many a village whose high-sounding 
name smacks of old Castile or fair Granada 
is indeed of the proportions of Martin Chuz- 
zlewit's Eden. Two or three warehouses, 
and a Tiencla, are sufficient to constitute a 
hamlet whither the monteros from miles 
around shall daily resort. There they lounge 
away the mornings, their horses tethered 

* The Selloi at Dodona gloried in being, avnzTOTroSeC] and who 
ever saw a clean Capuchin ? 



180 GAN-EDEN. 

all around the stone-floorecl piazza, and 
themselves hanging about the counters 
within, drinking aguardiente, (the " slow, 
sweet, Spanish name " for rum,) smoking 
cigar after cigar, jockeying, betting, and 
talking scandal. How many times has the 
painful idea seized me, a sort of mental 
stitch in the side, as I rode away from one 
of these barefooted, barefaced, disreputable 
assemblies, that the noisiest and most voluble 
Sir Oracle of them all, might perhaps, at no 
distant day, be inflicted upon our own unfor- 
tunate Congress, as a representative from the 
sovereign State of Cuba ! 



CHAPTER XIII. 

"By your leave, sweet welkin, I must sigh in your face." 

Love's Labor Lost. 

Man is at once the crown and the curse 
of earth. Human love may lend perfume 
to Paradise itself; human hate may make 
the desert more dreadful. Not for their 
snow are the wastes of Siberia most fearful; 
deadlier vapors than rise from her swamps, 
taint the sweet airs of the South. Within 
the shadow of the Pyramids the squalid 
Fellah skulks ; the Queen of the Antilles is 
a Queen of slaves ! 

I have called the great estates of Cuba 
principalities. Feudal lordships they too 
truly are. We cross the ocean to stare, 
in the self-complacent pride of liberty, 
upon the crumbling ruins of Kaglan, and 
16 



182 GAN-EDEN. 

of Baden, seeing in those grim walls 
which nature's ivy, and man's i omance have 
so softly veiled, the outward shape and 
shell of a life long since extinct. Yet here, 
near by our northern homes, that life is ac- 
tive still, as stern and strong as ever ! 
a Stone walls do not a prison make ! " " Cus- 
tom," cried Teufelsdrockh, " doth make do- 
tards of us all." The Paladin Orlando, the 
traitor Ganeion are busy still in their diverse 
paths, only serving or deceiving now a fool- 
ish magnanimous public, instead of a foolish 
magnanimous Charlemagne. The stone walls 
of cruel law, and prejudice, and passion, 
were the true prisons of the poor, the true 
castles of the great in the old feudal clays. 
They are standing now in the New World, 
with guarded battlements, and drawbridge 
lifted, and deep dangerous moat! Those 
features which make the retrospect of feu- 
dalism "romantic," are not wanting to charm 
sentimental travellers into a half admiration 
of modern slavery. The warm hospitality, 
the gallant bearing, the manly natural dig- 
nity of many a cultivated slave-holder, recall 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 183 

to us the best traits in the pictures of Cer- 
vantes and of Scott. 'The gentle-hearted 
mistress is the refuge and the treasury of 
her slaves ; the negro child bows his head 
and asks a blessing as his master passes, and 
the rude African, writhing in the agonies of 
the cholera, cries out that he should not die, 
if the master whom he reveres as a supe- 
rior being, were only by his side. " Up to 
the ears in corn and pumpkins," Quashee 
blesses such God as he worships, for his hour 
of laziness and sunlight, and thinks well of 
life. Won by personal qualities, which are 
everywhere the strongest bond between 
man and man, some faithful slave may well 
be found willing to die by his noble and 
considerate lord, and incapable of conceiv- 
ing a condition more satisfactory than his 
own. Without falling into the weakness of 
eclecticism, one may freely admit that the 
relation of a humane master to his slaves 
calls out certain virtues, which in the let alone 
system of modern civilization, are less fre- 
quently developed through the usual rela- 
tions of society. But at each step of his 



184 GAN-EDEN. 

progress towards a perfect social order, it 
has been the constant destiny of man to 
drop for a time some threads of the mighty 
web he is weaving, which is nevertheless, 
always advancing towards completion. We 
must judge any state of society by the 
totality of the impression it makes upon us. 
And we must remember that the character 
of that impression will depend very much 
upon the vivacity of our own instincts. The 
traveller in a slave country will find his love 
of luxury, and courtesy, and generous ease 
appealed to on every hand. Not less ur- 
gently and continually will his respect for 
man be aroused to protest against the tone 
and temper of society around him. If the 
couch and the banqueting-hall, the " clap- 
ping of hands, jars of jewels, and violet 
sherbet," carry the day, he will find more 
reasons than an Escobar could give, why 
just at this time, those things should be treated 
with considerate forbearance. But if within 
his heart, the wholesome thought of labor 
curdles, when beside the swart husbandman 
in the sunny fields, he sees the surly driver 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 185 

lounging, whip in hand, and brow severe 
with brief authority, no array of cunning 
arguments can ever avail with him against 
the witness of that moment's deep disgust. 
Once clothed in flesh, the mystery of wrong 
haunts the memory forever. 

The metaphysics of evil are the anodynes 
of the conscience, but the vision of tyranny 
lights a flame in the soul, before which 
doubts and opinions are as flax in the fire. 
And by the vision of tyranny, I do not mean 
the spectacle of what are usually called the 
" horrors of slavery." I have never seen in 
any slave country much positive physical 
suffering, and I saw less in Cuba than I have 
seen in Carolina. The " frightful sights " of 
miy country are not easily to be seen by 
the casual traveller. How many strangers 
can honestly say that they ever saw as much 
misery in London or in Paris, as they have 
seen within an easy walk of their own 
homes ? The sight of that which is usual, 
calm, and unimpassioned in the relations of 
the slave and the master, is itself the deep- 
est " horror of slavery," to a lover of free- 
16* 



186 GAN-EDEN. 

dom. How much more appalling than this 
or that detail of crime, is the perfect uncon- 
sciousness with which the literature and the 
art of antiquity reveal the secular riot of 
the senses ! And thus, in a land of slavery, 
it is the master's good-natured, unquestioning 
superiority, the slave's natural, unconstrained 
servility, which most shock the best instincts 
of manhood, and like the mere sight of the 
silent cannon and the ranged soldiery of 
insolent authority bearding unarmed right, 
rouse while they sadden the heart. 

Slavery on parade is just as repulsive to 
every thoughtful lover of the rights of man 
as is slavery in undress. It does not better 
the impression of the institution, that its 
victims appear to us sleek, fat, and gay. 
How does it affect our judgment of the 
nature and tendency of military life, to hear 
that General Jones visited the quarters of 
the men, "tasted their soup," and pro- 
nounced it excellent, and that the soldiers 
expressed themselves entirely satisfied with 
their condition? The London Board of 
Health have observed that complaints never 



PICTURES OP CUBA. 187 

come from the inhabitants themselves of the 
dirtiest, vilest, and most squalid dwellings. 
There can be no doubt that the praetorians 
of a Jung Bahadoor, or a Napoleon, would 
favor us with eulogistic views of despotic 
government. Just so the bulk of slaves, 
like the bulk of men everywhere, resign 
themselves to the inevitable limitations of 
their lot, and those of them who find favor 
with their masters are very likely to con- 
ceive exalted notions of their state. But 
as in the case of the denizens of filthy Wap- 
ping and close St. Giles's, though they may 
neither feel nor proclaim the depth of their 
own wretchedness, yet nature protests against 
the outrageous wrong, in the brand of ugli- 
ness and sin which she sets upon their faces 
and their forms, and in the sudden declama- 
tion of the pestilence ; so in the case of 
slavery, though the slaves themselves should 
find no fault, the eternal laws are vindicated 
in the baseness of the slave character, and 
in the sluggish chill that smites the life- 
blood of society. 

Every person who believes that man 



188 GAN-EDEN. 

was made for self-government, and who 
wishes to see the world about him flourish- 
ing mainly in the characters of his fellow- 
men, must look with utter loathing upon the 
system which severs the social nerves of 
feeling and of thought, and condemns the 
vast main body of society to a movement 
aimless, soulless, and mechanical. And this 
loathing if it be sincere, will find a voice. 
Slavery is everybody's business. It must 
be attended to thoughtfully and reasonably, 
like all other business, but the safety and 
hope of mankind are lodged in the freedom 
and force of private opinion, and the true 
spirit of a Christian civilization makes every 
man a missionary, to contend in his way and 
measure, against every wrong which he sees 
and feels in a world full of wrongs. Sancho 
Panzas abound, with small hearts set upon 
eventual Baratarias, but however common 
the folly of Don Quixote still may be, his 
nobility of mind and the unselfish devotion 
of Christian knight-errantry, do not grow 
like wild flowers. Whatever tends to en- 
courage their culture, must give delight to 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 189 

all, but to those who think that Jesus, when 
he said, a Ye all are brethren," meant u Mind 
your own business." Such must seek their 
ideal of human society in savage New 
Guinea, rather than in philanthropic New 
England. 

It was my fortune to see in Cuba perhaps 
the mildest form of agricultural slavery. 
Among the slave-holders of my acquaintance 
are .numbered some of my most valued 
friends, men of candor and of character, 
with whom one could speak as unreservedly 
on the subject of slavery, as with high- 
minded officers on the subject of war. Un- 
der their auspices I saw the system in its 
most favorable aspects. Moreover, the Span- 
ish slave laws rather resemble those of the 
East than those of America. There is a 
master too, above the masters in Cuba, and 
though the supreme authority is exerted less 
to benefit the slaves than to oppress the 
slave-holders, still there are circumstances of 
great superiority in the condition of the 
Cuban over that of the American slave. 
The American slave has no hope but that 



190 GAN-EPEN. 

of which man cannot deprive him, the hope 
of immortality. His earthly destiny is 
taken completely out of his own hands. 
He has no majority, and like a child or a 
beast, must look to receive from another his 
good or evil fortune, without an effort on 
his part. The Cuban slave is protected by 
the law in the enjoyment of a certain 
amount of property, and may apply his 
earnings to the purchase of his own liberty. 
An authoritative arbitration may settle his 
value, on his own appeal, and so soon as he 
shall accumulate fifty dollars, his master is 
obliged to accept that sum as an instalment 
of the slave's price which buys for him a pro- 
portionate command of his time, and in the 
event of his sale to another owner before he 
has accomplished his liberty, shall be carried 
to his credit. I have seen slaves who were 
free for five or six days out of the seven, and 
would soon emancipate themselves entirely.* 



* The large proportion of free negroes, (for they compose 
nearly one sixth of the population,) is a standing witness to the 
advantages enjoyed by the African race in Cuba. Moreover, the 
free blacks and mulattoes enjoy privileges which would not be 



PICTURES OF CUBA, 191 

The domestic relations of the Cuban slaves 
are also protected by the law, and the great 
immorality which exists among them, is a 
consequence of their own unrestrained sav- 
age instincts, and of the debasing example 
of the lower whites, rather than of any such 
tyranny as that which is too truly painted 
in Uncle Tom's Cabin. The Cuban law, too, 
forbids the infliction of more than twenty-five 
lashes (!) and the master who maltreats his 
slave, is compelled, as in Turkey, to sell him. 
The mildness of the climate is in favor of 
the Cuban negro. And on the great estates, 
the slave quarters, the baracones, are usually 
as neat and well arranged as on the best, the 
exceptional plantations of the South. The 
baracon is generally divided into separate 
domiciles which are about as large as an 
average Welsh cottage, and are rarely so 
dirty as the homes of the paradise of conso- 
nants. To the baracon a hospital is always 
attached, often under the charge of some 

granted them for an instant, in the American slave States. They 
are enrolled in the militia, and some of them have just been 
called into active service. 



192 GAN-EDEN. 

African Sangrado, skilled in leeching and 
bleeding, and in the compounding of " snake- 
butter,"* and other astonishing specifics, but 
always superintended by a physician who 
visits the estate once or twice a week, or 
even oftener, according to its size. The 
older women, exempted from harder labor, 
(for Cuba does not traffic much, like New 
Orleans, in second hand muscles) take care 
of the children in a great nursery. The 
children are not often numerous, for the 
growth of the slave population in Cuba is 
sadly checked by the influence of the slave- 
trade, which keeps up an alarming prepon- 
derance of the male sex. 

The greatest severity of toil is endured 

* " Snake-butter," extracted chiefly from the map, the largest 
snake in the island, is considered a specific for the rheumatism. 
St. Patrick seems to have visited Cuba also, though he contented 
himself there with converting the snakes. None of them are 
venomous in the slightest degree. Indeed, excepting the taran- 
tula and the scorpion, neither of which is half so bad as its repu- 
tation, Cuba has no dangerous creatures, even among the insects. 
The skin of the majo, which sometimes grows to the length of 
eight or ten feet, when tanned, makes a very pretty leather. 
Of such skins the fierce Aztecs used to make their " wild war- 
drums." For modern men of milder manners, they furnish the 
neatest of slippers. 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 19o 

by the slaves, who in small bands of three 
or four men, denied even such savage sem- 
blance of family life as the great estates 
afford, are worked upon the small tobacco- 
farms, by owners whose poverty of means, 
and love of luxury make them utterly in- 
human. Under the moonlight, as under 
the sunlight, these hapless wretches, with 
little rest and no comfort, must plant and 
tend and gather the pleasant poisonous 
weed. From that so famous "tobacco of 
the Vuelta Abajo," a cunning alchemist 
might draw secrets more fatal than its 
hidden nicotine ! 

Even on the best of the great estates, 
from November to May, the negroes are re- 
quired to work sixteen and sometimes nine- 
teen hours a day. They work, like sailors, 
by watches, making the " night joint laborer 
with the day," and startling the stranger 
from his midnight sleep, with the prolonged 
wailing cadences of their barbaric chants. 
In this excessive toil both sexes bear an 
equal part. It may, perhaps, be doubted 
whether this particularly aggravates the 
17 



194 GAN-EDEN. 

case. The hoe in the fields may possibly be 
less deadly to body and to soul, than the 
needle in the garret. 

The number of slaves in Cuba probably 
rather exceeds than falls short of 350,000. 
Of this number fully one half are Bozales, 
muzzled ones, (so runs the expressive phrase,) 
who cannot say whence they came. These 
are the native Africans, most of whom have 
been imported in defiance of the treaties 
with England, and are therefore entitled to 
their freedom. The complicity of several 
Captain-Generals with the slave-trade is a 
matter of notoriety in the island. The ad a 
ministration of the honorable and high- 
minded General Valdez, by showing how 
much an honest executive could do to inter- 
rupt this system of piracy, threw a heavier 
burden of suspicion upon his successors, and 
the innocence of General Canedo will not 
be easily established, in the face of the fact 
that large cargoes have been continually 
landed along the coast during his term of 
office. The energetic English consul has 
occasionally succeeded in bringing a number 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 195 

of newly landed slaves before the mixed 
commission, but the slave-trade still goes on 
profitably, and for the most part in Ameri- 
can bottoms, sailing under the American 
flag. The excitement which is sometimes 
created in America by the news that a Brit- 
ish cruiser has boarded an American vessel 
in the Cuban waters, would, doubtless, be 
considerably mitigated, did our patriotism 
reflect upon the disgraceful way on which 
our so-called " national honor " is constantly 
made to serve as a shield for the pirates of 
the slave-trade. The frequent advertise- 
ment in the Havana journals, of " a new, 
handsome, and swift American barque, en- 
tirely ready for sea," has a meaning easy to 
be mastered. The demand for these vessels 
is permanent, for after a slave-ship has dis- 
charged her fearful cargo, she is usually 
scuttled and sunk. The profit on victims 
who can be sold in Cuba at from six hun- 
dred to seventeen hundred per cent, profit 
on their cost in Africa, amply repays the 
great expenses of these horrible speculations. 
The freedom of the Bozales must be es- 



196 GAN-EDEN. 

tablished before the mixed commission. 
This mixed commission, of English and 
Spanish judges, sits at Havana. The " eman- 
cipados," or slaves declared free by this com- 
mission, are apprenticed for a term of eight 
years in the island, at the end of which time 
they are set free, and may be carried back 
to Africa, or to one of the British West 
Indies, usually to Jamaica. As the unfor- 
tunate men are generally captives of war, 
it would be impossible to restore them to 
their own countries, which, in many cases, are 
in the interior, and could only be reached 
through the territories of their natural ene- 
mies. We are often told that Jamaica is a 
much worse country for the negro than 
Cuba, but thus much is certain, that the 
slaves stolen from the British Islands, mani- 
fest a singular desire to return there. Sev- 
eral instances of the sort fell under my ob- 
servation, in one of which I had the pleasure 
of conveying to the English consul an inti- 
mation of the existence and wish to escape, 
of a negro, who, with two companions, had 
been stolen seventeen years before that 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 197 

time, from a fishing boat, and had been sold 
and resold six times, in different parts of 
Cuba. The emancipados have been often 
very vilely treated, those to whom they 
were hired selling them into slavery and 
returning their names as dead, at the end 
of the eight years. The honorable urgency 
of England to obtain a more faithful fulfil- 
ment of treaty obligations in regard to these 
men, is the only foundation, so far as I could 
learn, for the reports that England is trying 
to excite Spain to an imitation of her own 
democratic policy of emancipation. 

The numerous body of Bozales, emancipados 
and slaves, constitutes as may be supposed, 
a nucleus of insurrection, which, in the 
event of any general commotion, must prove 
formidable. It would be rash to say that 
the whites entertain any positive fear of the 
negro population. The frightful atrocities 
which attended the suppression of the 
alleged insurrectionary attempt of 1843-44, 
must be attributed to the rapacity of the 
Spanish fiscals and low officers of the crown, 
rather than to any panic among the Creoles. 
17* 



198 GAN-EDEN. 

Though the black population of Cuba out- 
numbers the white, the superiority of the 
latter in habits of command and resources 
of organization can hardly, under ordinary 
circumstances, be shaken. In Hayti, the 
blacks were thirty times more numerous 
than the whites, but the servile war even 
there, only attained importance through the 
conflict between the royalist and republican 
whites. 

It is not, however, to be denied that the 
wisest Cubans look with extreme dislike 
upon the constant introduction of new 
hordes of savages into the island. The 
Junta de Fomento, a quasi-representative 
body, now placed like every thing else, un- 
der the control of the Captain-General, has 
not hesitated to recommend, very urgently, 
the introduction of white and Indian colo- 
nists. Many coolies from China have been 
already dispersed, over the island, and they 
seem to give general satisfaction to the 
planters who employ them. Miss Bremer 
has described at length, the savage games 
and dances of the negroes, the spirit and 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 199 

zest of which are due entirely to the fresh 
vivacity of barbarian feeling continually 
infused into the negro population. The 
mirth of " El Dia de los Reyes/' the " Day 
of Kings/' has a strong flavor of the horri- 
ble. The No Popery dances of Hugh and 
Dennis, were Lydian measures when com- 
pared with the canni balesque contortions of 
that hideous carnival. 

Among the Bozales, the tribe of Lucumis 
is especially noticeable. The Lucumis are 
not only numerous; they are the fiercest 
and most warlike of the coast tribes, the 
Caribs of Africa. Their pride is such that 
they will rarely endure punishment. 

Dr. Wurdeman tells us of a planter, who, 
having purchased a gang of newly-landed 
Lucumis, thought fit to punish one of them. 
Soon afterwards he was summoned to the 
help of his overseer, and found the Lucumis 
dancing their war-dance around a tree on 
which the Lucumi who had been punished, 
was hanging, having taken refuge from 
what he thought disgrace, in suicide. Mat- 
ters looked very threatening. But the 



200 GAN-EDEN. 

planter, with great tact, ordered the dead 
body to be respectfully taken down, placed 
upon a bier and borne to the baracon. He 
followed it himself, hat in hand. The Lu- 
cumis stared, fell into the procession, and 
marched on in silence. At the baracon, the 
planter addressed them in praise of the 
brave Lucumi nation, and of that particular 
hero there before them, assured them they 
should be kindly treated, but must be gov- 
erned, and then requested them to bury 
their friend with all the honors of their 
savage wake. This proceeding quite concil- 
iated them, and the planter had little more 
trouble with them. The Lucumis are not 
merely proud and fierce. They are very 
intelligent. I have seen them intrusted 
with the care of important departments in 
the complicated sugar machinery, and a 
friend of mine in Havana, an admirable 
chess-player, was badly beaten at his favor- 
ite game, by a Lucumi, who had been but 
four years in the island, and yet spoke Span- 
ish as well as most of the Creole negroes. 
And the Lucumis are by no means the 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 201 

only fierce and intelligent savages imported 
into Cuba. Whether this constant ground 
swell into the sluggish waters of slavery is 
favorable or not to the safety of the vessel 
that floats on such a tide, my readers will 
decide for themselves. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

" They, too, have made verses, which have been published in books." 

Tacitus de Orat. 

I might go on with that fiery eulogist of 
" Young Home," Aper, to add, " and which 
are no better than the verses of Cicero/' 
did I not remember how much pleasure I 
took, long ago, in discussing certain " apples 
of gold in pictures of silver," which came 
to my hands as the first-fruits of the " gar- 
den of delight." Doubtless the majority 
of my readers will be surprised to hear that 
Cuba has any literature at all. And when 
we consider how completely the island has 
been enveloped in the colonial system of a 
government, which has always acted upon 
the resolution frankly proclaimed by Charles 
IV. when he suppressed the University of 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 203 

Maracaybo, "that information should not 
become general in America ; " and how ex- 
clusively the energies of the Creole mind 
have been directed to what is called practi- 
cal life, that is, to eating, drinking, sleeping, 
and trafficking, it certainly is astonishing 
that Cuba should have produced any writers 
capable of interesting mankind seriously by 
the vigor, dignity, and beauty of their 
works. Yet such, as I shall hope to show, 
is the case. 

I know how apt we are to overestimate 
any thing which has any flavor of " caviare." 
Superiorities of all sorts are sad snares. 
" Those oysters we had at Venice," have 
spoiled the appetite of many an untravelled 
friend, who was beginning to be ignorantly 
jubilant over the choicest products of 
Prince's Bay. And the oldest thoughts, 
clothed in a foreign tongue, affect us like a 
familiar landscape seen through stained win- 
dows. But after all deductions made, and 
judging them in the most impartial spirit, 
some of the Cuban authors deserve, it seems 
to me, this high praise, that they have been 



204 GAN-EDEN. 

thinkers and artists in a land indifferent to- 
thought and to art, true lovers of liberty in 
an atmosphere of oppression. Particularly 
must this praise be awarded to three men, 
Heredia, Milanes, and Placido. These all 
are poets, and the best productions of the 
Cuban mind must be sought in the field of 
poetry. The poet is everywhere the morn- 
ing star of mind, in whose light tyrants see 
only another ornament of the night they 
love, while the oppressed hail the harbinger 
of day. No prose-writer could ever have 
secured the publication in Cuba of the 
thoughts and feelings which her poets have 
given to the world. The government in 
every case, it is true, has awakened, sooner 
or later, to recognize the patriot in the min- 
strel, and there are few of the noteworthy 
bards of Cuba upon whom the hand of au- 
thority has not fallen more or less heavily. 
The works of most of these writers are now 
contraband at home, and cannot easily be 
procured. Formerly, there were several 
journals and magazines in the island, which 
used to be enriched with melodious sedition, 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 205 

but the censors of the press have suc- 
ceeded in purifying even the " Poet's Cor- 
ner." The " Revista de la Habana," the first 
number of which appeared during my stay 
in the island, is as decorously dull as the 
" Giornale di Roma " itself. 

A brief sketch of the character and tem- 
per of the poets whose names I have men- 
tioned, will show the reader how much there 
is to be repressed in the impulses of the 
higher class of Cuban minds. I select these 
writers, not merely because they seem to 
me the first in point of literary excellence, 
but because they sprang from three different 
classes of the city population. 

Jose Maria Heredia was a gentleman, by 
birth and position. The son of a patriot, 
whose patriotism made him an exile, Here- 
dia, born in 1803, at Santiago de Cuba, was 
carried in his childhood to Mexico. There, 
at the age of sixteen, he lost his father, and, 
returning to Havana, was admitted in 1823, 
to practice as an advocate, by the Supreme 
Court at Puerto Principe. His opinions and 
conduct soon attracted the suspicions of the 
18 



206 GAN-EDEN. 

government, and in November of the same 
year, he was obliged to fly to America. He 
published the first collection of his poems, 
at New York, in 1825. In 1826, he was 
invited to Mexico, where he was at once 
appointed assistant secretary of State, soon 
afterwards became a judge of the Supreme 
Court, and was sent to the senate of the 
republic. He died at Mexico in the prime 
of life, May 6, 1839. An edition of his 
works was published at Toluca in Mexico, 
in 1832, and another at Barcelona, the Mar- 
seilles of Spain, in 1840. As a man, Here- 
dia is honorably remembered for the gener- 
osity, integrity, and amiability of his char- 
acter ; as a poet, the dignity of his thought, 
the harmony of his versification, and the 
graces of his language well support his claim 
to the high rank which his countrymen have 
assigned to him; as a patriot, his love of 
country seems to have been not less wise 
than fervent. The following lines from one 
of his unpublished poems, "The Exile's 
Hymn," vibrate with the genuine thrill of 
poetic feeling, and with the manliest passion. 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 207 

Fair land of Cuba ! on thy shores are seen, 

Life's far extremes of noble and of mean ; 

The world of sense in matchless beauty dressed, 

And nameless horrors hid within thy breast. 

Ordained of Heaven the fairest flower of earth, 

False to thy gifts, and reckless of thy birth ! 

The tyrant's clamor, and the slave's sad cry, 

With the sharp lash in insolent reply, — 

Such are the sounds that echo on thy plains, 

While virtue faints, and vice unblushing reigns. 

Rise, and to power a daring heart oppose ! 

Confront with death these worse than deathlike woes. 

Unfailing valor chains the flying fate ; 

Who dares to die shall win the conqueror's state ! 

We, too, can leave a glory and a name 

Our children's children shall not blush to claim; 

To the far future let us turn our eyes, 

And up to God's still unpolluted skies ! 

Better to bare the breast, and undismayed 

Meet the sharp vengeance of the hostile blade, 

Than on the couch of helpless grief to lie, 

And in one death a thousand deaths to die. 

Fearest thou blood ? O, better, in the strife, 

From patriot wounds to pour the gushing life, 

Than let it creep inglorious through the veins 

Benumbed by sin, and agony, and chains ! 

What hast thou, Cuban ? Life itself resign, — 

Thy very grave is insecurely thine ! 

Thy blood, thy treasure, poured like tropic rain 

From tyrant hands to feed the soil of Spain. 

If it be truth, that nations still must bear 

The crushing yoke, the wasting fetters wear, — 

If to the people this be Heaven's decree, 

To clasp their shame, nor struggle to be free, 

From truth so base my heart indignant turns, 

With freedom's frenzy all my spirit burns, — 



208 GAN-EDEN. 

That rage which ruled the Roman's soul of fire, 
And filled thy heart, Columbia's patriot sire ! 
Cuba ! thou still shalt rise, as pure, as bright, 
As thy free air, — as full of living light ; 
Free as the waves that foam around thy strands, 
Kissing thy shores, and curling o'er thy sands ! 



Heredia's fine poem of Niagara must be 
known to many of our readers through Mr. 
Bryant's excellent version. It has always 
seemed to me one of the very best utter- 
ances ever called forth by a scene, whose 
praise, " expressive silence " best can muse. 
Even upon the brink of the mighty cata- 
ract, the palm-trees of Cuba sigh through 
the wanderer's thought, whispering sadly of 
the grievances and misery that flourish in 
their shade. The " Season of the Northers," 
inspires some natural and musical verses, in 
which the dreams of the patriot mingle 
still, with the blest reality of the husband's 
happy love. 



My happy land ! thou favored land of God, 
Where rest his mildest looks, his kindliest smiles, 
Oh ! not forever from thy soil beloved, 
May cruel fortune tear me ! but be thine 
The latest light that on these eyes shall shine ! 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 209 

How sweet, dear love, to listen to the rain, 
That patters softly on our humble home ; 
To hear the wild winds whistling o'er the plain, 
And the deep booming of the ocean's roar, 
Where shattering surges lash the distant shore ! 

There, by thy side, on softest couch reclined, 
My throbbing lyre shall rest upon thy knees, 
And my glad heart shall sing the boundless peace, 
Of thy fair soul, the light of thy dear face, 
My happy lot, and God's surpassing grace. 

Clearly Heredia was a man to be seriously 
" discouraged " by any despotic government. 
Milanes, born in a more humble rank of life, 
and bound by his occupation to the mercan- 
tile class, was not less warm and sincere in 
his patriotism than Heredia, But the tem- 
per of his mind was melancholy, and his 
sweetest strains are full of a sad, mystical 
fervor. His brother says of him in the pre- 
face to an edition of his works, published at 
Havana, that he "was inspired with the 
noble enthusiasm of accomplishing a great 
social mission, and possessed of faith and 
hope, selected, for the subject of his songs, 
moral or philosophical ideas." He is indeed 
a very plaintive poet, and in reading his 
verses we are haunted with a continual in- 
18* 



210 GAN-EDEN. 

definite sound of wailing. Certainly there 
is not much in the condition of Cuba which 
can inspire her bards with pride and pleas- 
ure. But the intense melancholy of Mi- 
lanes has a tone of personal suffering, like 
that which pervades the sonnets of Camoens, 
or the complaints of Tasso. The gloomy 
tendencies of the temperament of Milanes, 
aggravated by private troubles, and still 
more, no doubt, by the consciousness of his 
impotence to redress those wrongs of his 
country which he so keenly felt, finally over- 
powered his reason. 

The story of this young man, the purity 
of whose character, the elevation of whose 
aims, and the delicacy of whose genius have 
secured for him a real and beneficent influ- 
ence in his own country, sad as it is, is by 
no means the saddest to be found in the 
brief literary history of Cuba. A darker 
tragedy closed the career of the most inter- 
esting of the Cuban poets. Gabriel de la 
Concepcion Valdes, (not unknown in Amer- 
ica by his nom de plume of Placido,) was a 
mulatto of Matanzas, a comb-maker by trade, 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 211 

whose education was of the very rudest 
kind, a Pariah of society, bearing in his very 
form and color the ineffaceable badge of dis- 
grace and servitude. Yet this man tri- 
umphed over all the obstacles in his way, 
and after establishing a high reputation as a 
poet, set the seal to his fame by a dignified 
and heroic death. In 1844, particulars of 
an intended insurrection of the colored pop- 
ulation, came from various sources to the 
ears of the supreme authority in Cuba, and 
seemed to demand investigation. Every 
tning like a representative body having 
been abolished by Tacon, there was no ap- 
parent way open for consulting with the 
Creoles on the subject. The Captain-Gen- 
eral coolly resolved to settle the business by 
military commissions, and immediately let 
loose upon the island a horde of inferior 
officials, who proceeded to collect testimony, 
and to inflict punishment, after the fashion 
of the " process of the Templars," or " Jef- 
frey's Campaign." Numbers of free persons 
of color, and of slaves, died under the lash* 

* The British Commissioner, Kennedy, says three thousand. 



212 GAN-EDEN. 

many others were summarily shot, and such 
infamous excesses were committed by the 
fiscals as beggar belief. The victims of this 
dreadful persecution were stripped of their 
property, and the crown officers (with a few 
honorable exceptions,) soon converted their 
system of terror into a grand financial ex- 
pedient. White Creoles, and foreigners, were 
not exempted from this pestilence of power, 
and the planters were compelled to ransom 
their slaves at great cost, from the hands of 
a tribunal which arrested without accusation, 
and condemned without inquiry. The con- 
spicuous position of Placido among his peo- 
ple, marked him out as an early victim. It 
is not improbable that Placido may have 
been concerned in the conspiracy which 
there is really reason to suppose was then 
organizing, and though he contemptuously 
denied many of the charges brought against 
him, he does not appear to have shrunk 
from maintaining the right of the negroes 
to rise against oppression. He was found 
guilty and sentenced to be shot. He be- 
haved in prison with great propriety and 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 213 

composure, and won the admiration of the 
numbers who visited him. In the intervals 
of his preparation for death, he composed 
some of his finest poems, particularly his 
" Prayer to God." Can we deny the honors 
of genius to the Cuban mulatto who could so 
feel and speak ? 

O God of love unbounded ! Lord supreme ! 

In overwhelming grief, to thee I fly ; 

Rending this veil of hateful calumny, 
0, let thine arm of might my fame redeem ! 

Wipe thou this foul disgrace from off my brow, 

With which the world hath sought to stamp it now. 

Thou King of kings, my fathers' God and mine, 
Thou only art my sure and strong defence ; 
The polar snows, the tropic fires intense, 

The shaded sea, the air, the light, are thine ; 
The life of leaves, the water's changeful tide, 
All things are thine, and by thy will abide. 

Thou art all power ; all life from thee goes forth, 
And fails or flows obedient to thy breath ; 
Without thee, all is naught, in endless death 

All nature sinks, forlorn and nothing worth. 
Yet even the void obeys thee, and from naught, 
By thy dread word, the living man was wrought. 

Merciful God ! how should I thee deceive 1 

Let thy eternal wisdom search my soul ! 

Bowed down to earth by falsehood's base control, 
Her stainless wings not now the air may cleave. 

Send forth thine hosts of truth, and set her free ! 

Stay thou, Lord ! the oppressor's victory. 



214 GAN-EDEN. 

Forbid it, Lord, by that most free outpouring 
Of thine own precious blood for every brother 
Of our lost race, and by thy Holy Mother, 

So full of grief, so loving, so adoring, 

Who, clothed in sorrow, followed thee afar, 
"Weeping thy death like a declining star. 

But if this lot thy love ordains to me, — 

To yield to foes most cruel and unjust, 

To die, and leave my poor and senseless dust 
The scoff and sport of their weak enmity, — 

Speak, thou ! and then thy purposes fulfil ; 

Lord of my life, work thou thy perfect will ! 

A letter which Placido sent to his wife on 
the night before his death, is worthy of a 
place beside the more famous one which 
Padilla wrote in circumstances so similar. 
And thus the despised laborer bade farewell 
to his mother. 

The appointed lot has come upon me, mother, 

The mournful ending of my years of strife ; 

This changing world I leave, and to another, 

In blood and terror, goes my spirit's life. 

But thou, grief-smitten, cease thy mortal weeping, 

And let thy soul her wonted peace regain ; 

I fall for right, and thoughts of thee are sweeping 

Across my lyre, to wake its dying strain, — 

A strain of joy and gladness, free, unfailing, 

All-glorious and holy, pure, divine, 

And innocent, unconscious as the wailing 

I uttered at my birth ; and I resign, 

Even now, my life ; even now, descending slowly, 

Faith's mantle folds me to my slumbers holy. 

Mother, farewell ! God keep thee, and for ever ! 



PICTUKES OF CUBA. 215 

On the morning of June 28, Placido was 
led, with nineteen others, to the Plaza of 
Matanzas. He passed to his death, like an 
Indian chief, chanting for a death song his 
own noble "Prayer." He was to suffer 
first, stepped into the square, knelt with un- 
bandaged eyes, and gave the signal to the 
soldiers. When the smoke rolled away, it 
was seen that he had only been wounded, 
and had fallen in agony to the ground. A 
murmur of pity and horror ran through the 
crowd; but Placido slowly rising to his 
knees, drew up his form proudly, and cried, 
in a broken voice, " Farewell, world ! ever 
pitiless to me ! Fire ! here I " raising his 
hand to his temples. 

Possibly this dark history may not yet 
have rounded to its close. Men like Tous- 
saint and Placido, fall not obscurely nor un- 
avenged. Their friends are 

exultations, agonies, 
And love, and man's unconquerable mind. 

A Spanish traveller in Cuba, Salas y Qui- 
roga, says of Placido's poetical merits, "I 



216 GAN-EDEN. 

know no American poet, Heredia included, 
who approaches him in genius, in polish, in 
dignity." The same critic, after analyzing 
Placido's poetry, writes thus : — 

" It is truly wonderful to hear a poet, esteemed humble by the 
society in which he lives, addi-essing himself to the Queen-Re- 
gent of Spain in language like this : — 

Some one there is, who, with his golden lyre, 

Worthier thy sovereign ear, shall chant 

To the vibrations of its jewelled strings 

More grateful songs, perchance, but not more free ! 

And these lines are equally bold and daring : — 

And beats not thy heart, too 1 Therefore will I, 
While the pure dawn her snowy canopy 

Hangs on the orient sky, 
Bid my rejoicing hymns to God on high, 
Upborne by gentlest breezes, swiftly fly : — 
Let them who fear be dumb, for not of them am I ! 
If thou with pleasure hearest, let thy prayers 
Swift seek the Eternal, that my songs may rise 
Even to his throne, and then on Cuba fall, 
Impearled in blessings from the echoing skies ! 

" It was important for me to paint the poetic character of Pla- 
cido, to bring into clearer and clearer relief his astonishing merits. 
I fear, nevertheless, that my readers will not sufficiently appre- 
ciate the true condition of a miserable laborer in the island of 
Cuba, and only by such an appreciation can they fully estimate 
the great value of the lines I have quoted. The vigor of Pla- 
cido's versification corresponds to that of his thought. What 
poet, however loftily elevated by earthly glory, would not rejoice 
to be the author of the four following verses, so full and pol- 
ished, to which our language has few superior ? 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 217 

De gozo enajenados mis sentidos, 

Fije mi vista en las serenas ondas, 

Y vi las ninfas, revolver gallardas, 

Las rubias hebras de sus Arenzas blondas. 

" Almost all the versification of this poet is of this manly na- 
ture ; his sonnets to Napoleon, to Christ, and to William Tell, 
are three jewels of our literature ; the conclusion of the last is a 
noble cry of indignation : — 

That even the insensate elements 

Fling back the despot's ashes from their breasts. 

It is equally surprising to see the facility with which he manages 
the tenderest themes, and some of his compositions touch the 
deepest emotions of the soul. My task would be endless, should 
I attempt to extract all the beauties of these poems ; for if there 
are very few that can be quoted in full, there is not one unre- 
lieved by the light of genius. Their faults arise from the poet's 
want of instruction, their inspiration is celestial " 

And this man, be it once more remembered, 
was a person, whom many an American 
lady would have thought sufficiently hon- 
ored with a place behind her chair at the 
dinner-table, where he might have listened 
to edifying conversation, about the insulted 
genius of Burns, and the prejudices of a 
snobbish nobility ! 

I must not dwell here upon the names 

and works of Cuban poets of various merit, 

numerous enough to furnish some future Dr. 

Griswold with ample matter for one grand 

19 



218 GAN-EDEN. 

division of the a Poets and Poetry of Span- 
ish America ! " It is enough if I have 
clearly indicated the existence, in various 
ranks of Cuban civic society, of nobler 
thoughts and higher aims, than the press, or 
the prevailing character of social life reveal. 
The chief interest of the literature of Cuba 
is indeed derived from the proofs which it 
affords us, that the seeds of liberal thought 
and pure desires, which the winds and waves 
have somehow wafted even to those block- 
aded shores, have germinated, and are bear- 
ing fruit. As works of art, the poems which 
have fallen under my notice, cannot, in gen- 
eral, be highly commended. The literature 
of Spain, since the days of Cervantes and 
Calcleron, has been fertile chiefly in bad 
models. The vast majority of the later 
Spanish poets oscillate between the trivial 
and the dreary. The Spanish Pegasus has 
been broken to a tyrannous manege. The 
influence of a system of versification, not 
much less absurd than the rules of the mas- 
' ter singers, is felt by the most careless reader, 
in the indescribable tediousness of Spanish 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 219 

poetry. The study of the French Romanti- 
cists, (for France is the true teacher of the 
enlightened Cubans,) has indeed somewhat 
relieved the Cuban poets from this thral- 
dom. While Yolney and De Tracy have 
tauerht the Cubans materialism in morals 
and philosophy, Victor Hugo and Lamar tine 
have disclosed to them new secrets of poet- 
ical composition. But the prevailing tem- 
per of the tropics is hostile to the highest 
forms of poetry. In that eternal summer 
the voice grows languid as the mind. tt Out 
of their few warm days," says Landor, a the 
English, if the produce is not wine and oil, 
gather song, and garner sensibility." Out 
of their unchanging heats and splendors, the 
sons of the tropics gather tears and garner 
sentimentalism. The Cuban muse rarely 
tries the flights of the " Theban eagle ; " as 
rarely, the soaring rapture of the English 
lark ; she sits in the heavy foliage of her 
delicious home, and there "her sad song 
mourneth well," or ill, as the case may be. 

The names of the Cuban poets, those 
rich, sonorous Spanish names, which you 



220 C^AN-EDEN. 

cannot utter without an unconscious infla- 
tion of the voice, and an involuntary wave 
of the hand, tempt one to expatiate upon 
this subject. But I shall forbear. The 
titles of some of their works will convey a 
sufficient idea, to the judicious reader, of the 
school to which they should be referred. 
"Leaves of My Soul," "Heart-Beats/' "Whirl- 
winds of the Tropics/' "Passion-Flowers/' 
such are the baptismal phrases in which 
the Cubans delight. Gleams of manlv as- 
piration are not wanting in these writings, 
nor the comfortable light of a true respect 
for what is truest in womanhood. Milanes 
is not alone in the faith, that 

Still in woman's heart the true Eden lingers, 
Bearing fruit of Loving, Feeling, and Belief. 

Vivid descriptions of natural scenery, much 
in the glowing Portuguese manner, illumin- 
ate their pages. Imaginative, these poets 
rarely are. With that quality, none of them 
was so richly gifted as Placido. His images 
are often pathetic in their originality ; as, 
for instance, when he compares the sudden 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 221 

passing of the moon from behind the cliffs 
into the open starlit sky, to the advent into 
the ball-room, of a beautiful woman, su- 
perbly dressed,, and wearing a Cashmere 
shawl ! Quaintly barbaric this image seems, 
yet how charged it is with the sad history 
of gorgeous dreams and warm visions, pris- 
oned in the poet-brain of an outcast and a 
Pariah ! 

The prose literature of Cuba may be 
quickly reviewed. "How can we speak, 
who have no freedom to will," cried Jacques 
de Molay to his judges, "for with the loss 
of freedom to will, man loses every thing, 
honor, courage, eloquence I" No plea of 
"poetic license/ , avails the Cuban whose 
words are not tagged with rhymes. The 
Havana bookstores contain nothing to indi- 
cate that the " University of Havana " has 
borne any more fruit than El Azhar, the 
Oxford of the Arabs. The periodicals are 
trashy in the extreme, the newspaper press is, 
of course, entirely in the hands of Spaniards. 

In the feidlieton, the ladies are generally 
furnished with a translation of some French 
19* 



222 GAN-EDEN. 

novel. The editorials are often able, but 
the body of the paper is filled with very 
much such matter as one finds in the col- 
urns of the " newspapers " which young la- 
dies at boarding-schools sometimes concoct. 
The current news of the island is only to 
be picked up at hearsay in Havana, and 
chiefly on the covered quay at the mouth 
of the harbor, where every morning, u the 
merchants most do congregate." The old 
Spaniards are very chary of their commu- 
nications, and the Creole hatred of the gov- 
ernment acts like a mordant, biting in the 
blackest shades of every picture. 

While I was at Havana, the garrotte was 
several times erected at the Punta, and 
twice for the punishment of political offend- 
ers. The newspapers made no allusion to 
any of these events. In one instance, I 
happened to be dining on board a man-of- 
war, where an officer in the company gave 
us the history of one of the political prison- 
ers, (both of whom, by the way, were re- 
prieved at the place of execution, and sent 
to the galleys at Ceuta,) telling us that his 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 223 

name was Garcia, and that he was a misera- 
ble old creature, at whose house two of the 
Lopez party, badly wounded, had been left. 
He treated them very well, but they died. 
Shortly afterwards the news of Las Pozas 
reached him, and our Cuban FalstafF in- 
stantly produced his dead pirates, alleging 
that he had slain them, "for Queen and 
Country." He was rewarded with a deco- 
ration, but the truth coming to light after a 
while, Senor Garcia was compromised, and 
finally brought into the shadow of death. 
A day or two after the reprieve, there ap- 
peared in the Diario, what purported to be 
a sort of Jubilate from the wife of one Garcia, 
who ought to have suffered something, but 
had been spared by the Queen's mercy. No 
one, who had not in some surreptitious way 
heard of Garcia and his story, could possibly 
have comprehended this singular communi- 
cation. Two mutinies of troops, at least, 
accompanied with fusillades, came to my 
knowledge, one at Villa Clara, and the other 
at Santiago de Cuba. They were only 
darkly glanced at, in leaders laudatory of 



224 GAN-EDEN. 

the " firm justice of Spain," and contemptu- 
ous of the scandal, which something not 
stated, might cause in " a neighboring na- 
tion." The Cuban press is indeed no tran- 
script of the Cuban, but only of the 
" Peninsular " world. 



CHAPTER XV. 

" Concini. Mais ce qui me rapporte le plus, c'est de tirer les horo- 
scopes et de dire la bonne aventure. Isab. Vraiment ! vous savez 
dire l'avenir ? " A. De Vigny. (La Marechale d'Ancre.) 

These are many Concinis in our councils 
of State, gipsy politicians, who become pro- 
phetic as soon as their palms have been 
crossed with the silver of office. And these 
men have so satisfied the people that the An- 
tilles also are our inheritance, that it may be 
dangerous to hint a doubt on that subject. 
It seems to be settled that Spain is at best, 
but a tenant for years in her colony. Is it 
rumored that Spain thinks of abolishing sla- 
very in Cuba ? Instantly the heir cries out, 
"Spain shall by no means commit waste. 
Nothing is so dear to me as my slaves, pres- 
ent and to come ! " The continent clamors 
for its « manifest destiny." What chance is 



226 GAN-EDEN. 

there of a hearing, for a few deprecatory 
voices? Were it even conceivable that a 
minority could be in the right, yet wisdom 
exclaims with Moliere, " Qu'est ce que la 
raison avec un filet de voix, contre une 
gueule comme celle-la ? " It is a rash 
thing to disturb that comfortable slumber 
of a decided opinion, which majorities 
love. The laws of Menu protected the 
quiet of Brahmins, by pouring hot oil into 
the ears of anybody who ventured to offer 
them so much as a hint, on any moral 01 
religious subject. Only less severe, are the 
punishments ordained for those who dare 
question the political creed of a majority. 
Wiser in their generation, are those writers 
who, whether historical or prophetic, as 
Montaigne observes. " make it their trade to 
turn all events to our advantage, in spite of 
sense and reason, and omit every considera- 
tion in the least degree ticklish ! " 

Spain is tyrannical, Cuba is rich, America 
is ravenously republican. From these prop- 
ositions it has been deduced that Cuba must 
soon become a member of our great and 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 227 

glorious confederacy. Admitting the prop- 
ositions, I feel bound to question the conse- 
quence. And this is the method of my 
croaking. 

The Spanish rule in Cuba is undoubtedly 
hateful. The immense majority of the 
Creoles as undoubtedly hate it. And neither 
the cause nor the effect is of recent origin. 
Why then is Cuba still a Spanish colony, 
and why does it bear the title of " Ever 
Faithful ? " It is long, since the legend on 
the Spanish coins, calling the sovereign 
" prosperous in both worlds," became an idle 
lie. The Peninsula succumbed to France, 
and was saved by England. One after 
another, the provinces of America tore them- 
selves from the desperate clutch of the 
mother country. 

Cuba and Porto Rico alone were left to 
the crown. And for this reason. The Creoles 
of these islands preferred their colonial de- 
pendence, to such independence as that of 
San Domingo. It was doubtless disagreeable 
enough to the hidalgos of the mainland, to 
coalesce, in any degree, with the peons of 



228 GAN-EDEN. 

Mexico or Peru ! The Cubans could not, 
for a moment, endure a mulatto republic ; 
they knew that in the event of a war they 
must secure the negroes as auxiliaries, or 
meet them as antagonists, and they preferred 
quiet to either of these alternatives. Unfit- 
ted as I believe the great body of the Cuban 
Creoles to be, for the conflict or the triumph 
of liberty, Cuba has never lacked men 
enough, fully equal in courage and charac- 
ter to the best and bravest patriots of Span- 
ish America, whose influence might have 
roused their fellow-countrymen to a success- 
ful revolt. But slave-holding Cuba dares 
not attempt her freedom. 

"Yet if Cuba cannot be revolutionized 
from within, may she not be revolutionized 
from without?" ^e hear constantly of 
"armies of deliverance" on the way to 
those fair shores, and it has been not indis- 
tinctly hinted, that the strong arm of the 
American government may be stretched out 
to aid the oppressed islanders. If Spain 
could be driven suddenly from all her foot- 
holds in Cuba, by a grand coup de main 7 and 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 229 

the places of the Spanish troops could be 
instantly filled by an equal force of Ameri- 
can soldiery, regular or irregular, it is cer- 
tainly possible that " order " might be main- 
tained in the new republic. But those who 
count upon an easy and immediate victory 
over Spain, reckon, it is to be feared, with- 
out their hosts. The Spanish troops in 
Cuba are now more than respectable in 
numbers, and though they are probably in- 
ferior, in many important attributes, to our 
own, still they come of a brave stock, and 
of a people particularly famous for fighting 
behind stone walls. Spain, too, has often 
shown that she is never so much to be feared 
as when contending in a desperate cause. 
Nations as well as individuals have their in- 
sanities of honor, and nothing is more for- 
midable than the tenacious ferocity which 
clings to a falling cause, and never counts 
the cost. Our own country is, at this time, 
most lamentably weak upon the water, and 
we shall do well to remember that the noble 
sea-coasts of Spain swarm with poor, and 
bold, and skilful sailors, ready for the service 
20 



230 GAN-EDEN. 

of speculative adventurers in the old world 
and the new. Glib orators at Tammany 
Hall may find proposals for the conquest of 
Cuba sweet in the mouth, but they will 
prove bitter in the digestion. And when 
the Spaniard shall have been driven from 
the island, are we to expect a pleasant en- 
joyment of our prize ? How will the patri- 
archal communities of the South relish the 
society of a state charged with permanent 
and organized negro insurrection ? We need 
but turn to the history of the Maroons in 
Jamaica, or to the bloodier and more recent 
career of the revolted Indians in republican 
Central America, if we would form some 
notion of the state into which Cuba would 
be plunged by a servile war, Cuba, whose 
negroes are to be counted by hundreds of 
thousands, and whose vast wildernesses are 
not less deadly to the white man, than the 
everglades of Florida. 

A violent transfer of Cuba from the hands 
of Spain to those of America, would be at- 
tended with the most disastrous effects upon 
her prosperity. The tobacco crop might 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 231 

perhaps be increased, but the sugar interest 
would be sadly shaken, and those canny 
economists who read the fate of nations in 
the Sibylline leaves of the ledger, can see 
no good flowing from such a consummation, 
to any American State, unless, perhaps, to 
Louisiana, which might rejoice over the pros- 
tration of her greatest rival. The political 
and moral influence of a Cuban common- 
wealth, exasperated by the most debasing 
of wars, certainly would not tend to dissi- 
pate the clouds which now overhang the 
nation. 

Will the conquest of Cuba be attempted ? 
There can be no doubt that slavery, despair- 
ing of her northern frontiers, has long been 
looking to Spanish and Portuguese America 
as her future domain, into which the power 
of the Union must be made to force her 
way.* The accidental defeat of her designs 

* The charming naivete with which Lieut. Herndon, an officer 
of the American navy, officially exploring- the valley of the Am- 
azon, talks of the fitness of the soil of Brazil for slave labor, 
(Report, pp. 268, 281, 341,) is but one evidence among many, of 
this fact, and of the kindred fact, proofs of which are by no 
means so hard to find as we are slow to find them, that slavery 



232 GAN-EDEN. 

upon California, has naturally enough stim- 
ulated her zeal in other directions. Mexico, 
Central America, the valley of the Amazon, 
lie along the horizon of her hopes. Cuba 
and Hayti are near at hand. But the South 
sadly overrates the resources of repression 
at her command, and as sadly underrates 
the explosive forces sleeping in the bosom 
of Cuba, in anticipating a real accession to 
her power from the conquest of that island. 
"May not Cuba, however, be fairly pur- 
chased ? " The wealthy states of America 
may perhaps be won over by their persua- 
sive southern sisters, to furnish the funds for 
such a purchase, and the present tyrannical 
and corrupt government of Spain, may pos- 

has thoroughly identified itself with American policy and the 
American name. It is truly humiliating for a traveller, to see 
how generally it is taken for granted, that an American must be 
friendly to slavery, and to the prejudices that grow out of it. I 
happened once, at a country-house in Cuba, to be called upon 
for my opinion, in a controversy as to the propriety of admitting 
negroes into railway carriages and coaches. When I said that 
it seemed to me neither republican nor well-bred to object to the 
presence, in a public conveyance, of any decent, and well-be- 
haved person of whatever color ; " Ah ! " cried a lady in the 
company, " I thought you did not look like an American, and 
now I see that you must be an Englishman ! " 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 233 

sibly be seduced into the sale. But the 
antecedents and the temper of Spain make 
such a transaction in the last degree 
unlikely. And if it were quietly accom- 
plished, would the clouds be thereby raised 
from the future of Cuba ? To rear in that 
fair island a slave-holding republic, is only 
to postpone, not to avert her ruin. 

The " Orators of the Human Race," may 
consider it their professional duty to deny 
this. They may tell us that the annexation 
of Cuba will bring with it newspapers, and 
the ballot-box, and representation for the 
whites, and they may point us to the States 
of the South, where freedom and slavery 
have so long lived on amicable terms, and 
the building of the commonwealth has been 
safe, while thunderstorm after thunderstorm 
of thought has overswept the world. It is 
hard to reason with " Orators of the Human 
Race," but harder to believe that buildings 
can be safe, whose lightning rods end on the 
roof ! 

Clouds and darkness overshadow the fu- 



234 GAN-EDEN. 

ture of fair and fertile Cuba. Physical 
geography, and the nineteenth century have 
not quite done away with the old mysteries 
of doubt and doom. 

The finest regions of the earth lie still 
unblest by happy human life. The loveliest 
climates of the conquered world, are breathed 
and have been breathed, for ages past, by 
despots and by slaves. The broadest rivers 
bear least upon their bosoms. These are 
ways of God which even our curious cen- 
tury shall not find out. 

While the chances of life cheat individual 
hope, shall we wonder at and deny the re- 
tributions that overtake national sins and 
follies ? Do we see, in individual men, the 
permitted waste of noblest powers, the ty- 
ranny of vice, the dissolution of life, and 
shall we be startled out of measure, at the 
mystery of national wrong and national deg- 
radation ? Within the narrowest circle of 
human interests and affections, lie wrecks 
and deserts, melancholy as those that deform 
the shores of the oceans and of the ages. 



PICTURES OF CUBA. 235 

The same faith which brightens our private 
experience of good and ill, alone can cheer 
the stern realities and dark expectancies of 
the world's wider life. 



L'ENVOI. 



I. 

The young breath of the northern spring is lifting, 
The airy curtains drooping round my head; 
Small argosies of summer, wrecked and drifting, 
Sink through the seas of moonlight round me spread. 

II. 

Fair Odalisque upon the purple lying, 
Luxurious daughter of the South, farewell ! 
Upon my car the palm-tree's passionate sighing, 
Fades, with the summer sea's voluptuous swell. 

III. 

Our years decay. Our souls sail onward, teeming 
With hopes and wishes unfulfilled below; 
Oh, North of life ! Oh, South of gorgeous dreaming ! 
Whence shall the undeceiving breezes blow 1 



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May 25, 1854. 



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